Towards a Unified OWL Ontology of Cloud Vendors´ Appliances and Services at PaaS and SaaS Level

Virtualization technologies represent the basis of many software architectures and frameworks existing today, Cloud Computing being probably the most influenced paradigm in the current scenery. With the steady growth of new Cloud and Virtualization platforms, which have caused the proliferation of many Cloud Services and Virtual appliances, it seems necessary to put order in the chaos of overlapping functionalities such services and appliances provide. A common representation of both Cloud Services and Virtual Appliances can be the perfect starting point to define a functional classification that could help customers choose the resources which best adhere to their objectives. A semantic based representation, implemented through an OWL [1] ontology, is probably the best candidate for this purpose, thanks to the flexibility of the OWL language and the possibility to navigate the ontology using both visual tools and query languages.