Ontology-based annotation and retrieval of services in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing is a technological paradigm that permits computing services to be offered over the Internet. This new service model is closely related to previous well-known distributed computing initiatives such as Web services and grid computing. In the current socio-economic climate, the affordability of cloud computing has made it one of the most popular recent innovations. This has led to the availability of more and more cloud services, as a consequence of which it is becoming increasingly difficult for service consumers to find and access those cloud services that fulfil their requirements. In this paper, we present a semantically-enhanced platform that will assist in the process of discovering the cloud services that best match user needs. This fully-fledged system encompasses two basic functions: the creation of a repository with the semantic description of cloud services and the search for services that accomplish the required expectations. The cloud service’s semantic repository is generated by means of an automatic tool that first annotates the cloud service descriptions with semantic content and then creates a semantic vector for each service. The comprehensive evaluation of the tool in the ICT domain has led to very promising results that outperform state-of-the-art solutions in similarly broad domains.