Carlos Rodrigues, Luis M. Álvarez-Sabucedo*, Solange Rito Lima, Paulo Carvalho
*University of Vigo
Dept. of Telematics, Vigo, Spain
Centro ALGORITMI
Universidade do Minho
Departamento de Informática
P-4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Tel.: +351 253 604432
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: pmc at di.uminho.pt
The road toward ubiquity, heterogeneity and virtualization of
network services and resources urges for a formal and systematic
approach to network management tasks. In particular, the
semantic characterization and modeling of services provided to users
assume an essential role in fostering autonomic service management,
service negotiation and auditing.
This paper is centered on the definition of an ontology for
multiservice IP networks which intends to address multiple service
management goals, namely: (i) to foster client and service provider
interoperability; (ii) to manage network service contracts,
facilitating the dynamic negotiation between clients and ISPs; (iii) to
access and query SLA/SLSs data on an individual or aggregated basis to
assist service provisioning in the network; and (iv) to sustain service
monitoring and auditing. In order to take full advantage of the
proposed semantic model, a service model API is provided to allow
service management platforms to access the ontological contents. This
ontological development also takes advantage of SWRL to discover new
knowledge, enriching the possibilities of systems described using this
support.