An ontology-based approach for semantic interoperability in interorganizational IT service management

IT services are more and more offered by a combination of on- and off-premises or even cloud services. While for internally provided IT services guidelines and standards for the IT management exist, the IT management must be further supported by integrating management aspects of external IT services. Based on our previous concept of the inter-organizational Configuration Management Database, in this article, we concentrate on an ontology-based solution for the problem of heterogeneity issues caused by the autonomy in modeling CMDB contents in each of the observed IT service provider organizations. Our concept delivers a stepwise approach to handle semantic mismatches and is based on a hybrid Ontology mapping. Besides solving the heterogeneity of the service providers' management information systems and offering a holistic view of the overall IT infrastructure to the IT management, semantic mechanisms additionally allow to retrieve knowledge in an automated manner.