Disambiguating Availability Specification through the use of OWL

Many Quality of Service (QoS) languages exist. However, not only do few encompass dependability, none acknowledge the semantic complexity of the vocabulary they provide. This paper presents a Quality of Service ontology which provides not only an extensible syntax for expressing dependability, but also rich, well-defined semantics. These semantics avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding as well as facilitating translation where possible. To demonstrate these features, this paper examines in depth how to use our QoS ontology along with the built-in capabilities of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to capture the semantics of availability.