An analysis of mOSAIC ontology for Cloud resources annotation

The easiness of managing and configuring resources and the low cost needed for setup and maintaining Cloud services have made Cloud Computing widespread. Several commercial vendors now offer solutions based on Cloud architectures. More and more providers offer new different services every month, following their customers needs. Anyway, it is very hard to find a single provider which offers all services needed by end users. Furthermore, different vendors propose different architectures for their Cloud systems and usually these are not compatible. Very few efforts have been done in order to propose a unified standard for Cloud Computing. This is a problem, since different Cloud systems and vendors have different ways to describe and invoke their services, to specify requirements and to communicate. Hence a way to provide a common access to Cloud services and to discover and use required services in Cloud federations is appealing. mOSAIC project addresses these problems by defining a common ontology and it aims at developing an open-source platform that enables applications to negotiate Cloud services as requested by users. The main problem in defining the mOSAIC ontology is in the heterogeneity of terms used by Clouds vendors, and in the number of standards which refer to Cloud Systems with different terminology. In this work the mOSAIC Cloud Ontology is described. It has been built by analysing Cloud standards and proposals. The Ontology has been then refined by introducing individuals from real Cloud systems.