This paper reports on work in progress to produce a unified Quality of Service (QoS) ontology This ontology must be applicable to the main scenarios currently identified such as QoS-based Web Services selection, QoS monitoring and QoS adaptation. An evaluation of existing research in the field of QoS and Service Level Agreement (SLA) ontologies is presented. Many of the authors of these works are involved in the initiative. The aim of this evaluation is to identify the weaknesses and strengths of existing ontologies in order to decide which parts of each should form the basis of a unified ontology. Current progress in the ontology engineering process is also presented. 1.

Recently, Web Services (WSs) have evolved to a quite popular research field. Nevertheless, there are obstacles that prevent the introduction of WS provision in the wide market. Among these is the inability to represent the non-functional features of WSs, i.e. their Quality-of-Service. Integrating QoS features in WS profiles is to the advantage of both users and providers, as it enables QoS-aware WS selection and composition addressing the user’s QoS requirements and objectives, while giving WS providers a significant competitive advantage in the e-business domain, also maximizing their resources ’ utilization. This paper focuses on the formulation of a QoS ontology framework that is used to support QoS-aware WS provision. It is based on work carried out in the IST-Amigo 1 Integrated Project for Ambient Intelligence (AmI) homes, which, exploiting heterogeneous technologies and infrastructures, aims to develop an open, standardized, interoperable middleware for the provision of QoS-aware AmI WSs to domestic users. 1.

Web Services (WSs) are a new breed of web application that have brought out quite challenging research issues. One of these is the establishment of an interoperable semantic framework suitable to represent all potential features of WSs. Apart from the functional properties that have already been modeled via standardized tools, there are also the nonfunctional features of WSs i.e. their Quality-of-Service, which in most cases are not included in the WS description. Nevertheless, integrating QoS features in WS profiles is to the advantage of both users and providers, as it supports QoS-aware WS selection and composition addressing the user’s QoS requirements, while enabling WS providers to increase their profit in the e-business domain. This paper is concerned with the creation of a QoS ontology framework adequate for WS provision. It has sprang from the work carried out

Composing existing web services to obtain new functionalities is important for e-business applications. Deficiencies of aggregated web services can be compensated involving a redundant number of them for critical tasks. Key steps lie in Quality of Service (QoS) evaluation and selection of web services with good quality in order to avoid frequent and severe faults of a composite service. This paper, first, surveys the existing approaches for QoS-driven web service selection. Then, it describes an improved selection algorithm that takes into account success rate, response time and execution cost of involved web services. Finally, we propose a novel approach for evaluating quality of redundant service compositions through analysis of risk related to the use of external web services.

Sharing data between organizations is challenging because it is difficult to ensure that those consuming the data accurately interpret it. The promise of the next generation WWW, the semantic Web, is that semantics about shared data will be represented in ontologies and available for automatic and accurate machine processing of data. Thus, there is interorganizational business value in developing applications that have ontology-based enterprise models at their core. In an ontology-based enterprise model, business rules and definitions are represented as formal axioms, which are applied to enterprise facts to automatically infer facts not explicitly represented. If the proposition to be inferred is a requirement from, say, ISO 9000 or Sarbanes-Oxley, inference constitutes a model-based proof of compliance. In this paper, we detail the development and application of the TOVE ISO 9000 Micro-Theory, a model of ISO 9000 developed using ontologies for quality management (measurement, traceability, and quality management system ontologies). In so doing, we demonstrate that when enterprise models are developed using ontologies, they can be leveraged to support business analytics problems- in particular, compliance evaluation- and are sharable.

Abstract- SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are commonly signed agreements forming the contract between a service provider and a service consumer defining the obligations of the two parties. The client has often predefined choices by the provider. Consequently, he may not understand these choices as he can be a non specialist and he cannot express freely his requirements using his own knowledge and language. The goals of this work are (1) offering opportunities to the client to express his needs freely and (2) facilitating the analysis of these needs and the contract generation to the provider. This paper proposes the necessary models and algorithms (1) to capture the client intention and the provider offers, (2) to perform a complete matching process between them to test if they are compatible and (3) to automatically generate a draft version of an SLA to the service provider for its verification and proposal to the client. I.

Abstract — The use of the Internet as a global communication infrastructure to support a wide range of multiconstrained applications and services poses new challenges to ISPs regarding network services management and auditing. In this context, the semantic characterization and modeling of services provided to users assumes an essential role in fostering service management automation. Moreover, the semantic and formal description of services allows enhancing the negotiation and interoperability between clients and service providers. This paper reports the first steps toward the definition of an ontology for multiservice networks that eases and systemizes decision support of QoS deployment in ISP infrastructures, according to service levels established in SLAs. Other management tasks such as dynamic service negotiation and configuration, service monitoring and auditing may also benefit from the present ontology proposal. I.

Abstract. 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.

In Service Oriented Computing (SOC), modeling the Quality of Service (QoS) is a cornerstone for providing services with quality guarantees. As the technological advances and wide adoption of handheld devices (e.g., PDA and smartphones) and wireless networks (e.g., UMTS, WiFi and Bluetooth) have made service environments more dynamic, QoS models must change accordingly. In this paper, we present a QoS model that provides the approporiate ground for QoS engineering in SOC. Our model focuses on emerging QoS features related to the dynamics of service environments such as user mobility and context awareness of application services. It also considers QoS on an end-to-end basis by covering QoS features of all the resources and actors involved in service provisioning (e.g., network, device, service, end-user). Our model represents QoS with rich semantic information and makes use of the Web Service Quality Model (WSQM) proposed by OASIS.

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