A framework for modeling and reasoning about network management resources and services to support information reuse

Most service and network management applications are developed to use vendor- and device-specific management data. These data are produced from different languages, and hence can have different representations of the same concept. We define a novel knowledge representation and mapping mechanism that uses ontological concepts and relations to generate a formal description for the Directory Enabled Networks new generation information model. This endows the model with the necessary semantic richness and formalism to represent different types of information for use in network management operations. Data is extracted from models, and is used to represent facts. These facts are semantically related to concepts and relations from one or more ontologies using a lexicon. A new data structure is then built by combining knowledge extracted from model elements with knowledge extracted from ontological elements. Semantic relatedness measures are then used to associate modeled data with ontological data. Early results are also presented.