Cloud description ontology for service discovery and selection

Cloud computing is a model delivery of infrastructure, platform and software services over the net. The lack of standardization of heterogeneous Cloud service descriptions makes service discovery and selection very complex tasks for Cloud users. To ease this complexity, it is crucial to describe the various Cloud service pertinent information in a homogeneous model. To provide for such model, this paper offers to contributions. First, it proposes a Cloud description ontology that integrates service descriptions obtained from heterogeneous sources. The ontology model accounts for the functional and non-functional properties, attributes and relations of infrastructure, platform and software services in order to facilitate the discovery and selection of suitable Cloud services. Second, this paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the proposed ontology. For the qualitative evaluation, we use a reasoner to identify defects in the ontology, whilst for the quantitative evaluation we compare our search results with those obtained through a web search engine.