An agent-based cloud service discovery system that consults a cloud ontology

Abstract

This paper presents a Cloud service discovery system (CSDS) that aims to support Cloud users in finding a Cloud service over the Internet. The CSDS interacts with a Cloud ontology to determine the similarities among services. The significance of this project is that it is the first attempt in building an agent-based discovery system that consults an ontology when retrieving information about Cloud services. One of the main contributions of this work is building a Cloud service reasoning agent (CSRA) that enables the CSDS to (1) reason about the relations of Cloud services and (2) rate the search results. Another contribution of this work is designing and constructing a Cloud ontology consisting of a taxonomy of concepts of Cloud services that enables the CSRA to determine the relations of Cloud services using three service reasoning methods: (1) similarity reasoning, (2) equivalent reasoning, and (3) numerical reasoning. Empirical results show that using the Cloud ontology, the CSDS is more successful in finding Cloud services that are closer to users' requirements. Experiments are also conducted to examine the effect of using different combinations of the three service reasoning method: (1) using only similarity reasoning, (2) using similarity reasoning and equivalent reasoning, and (3) using all three reasoning methods. Additionally, a proof-of-concept example demonstrates the major functionalities of the CSDS. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.