Runtime Semantic Interoperability for Gathering Ontology-based Network Context

The trends for pushing more operational intelligence towards network elements to achieve more context-aware and self-managing behavior often requires elements to gather network knowledge without necessarily binding explicitly to all of the potential sources of that knowledge. Though event-based publish-subscribe models allow efficient distribution of knowledge where the event types are known globally, dynamic service chains, ad hoc networks and pervasive computing application all introduce a more fluid and heterogeneous range of context knowledge. This requires some runtime translation of knowledge between sources and sinks of network context. This paper builds on existing mapping techniques that use ontological forms of existing management information models to examine the extent to which these can be employed for runtime semantic interoperability for network knowledge. It presents results in developing a management knowledge delivery framework based on existing models and platforms, but which offers a more decentralized knowledge exchange mechanism.