Ontology-Based Saas Catalogue for Cloud Services Publication and Discovery

摘要

The number of software providers offering their applications as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) toexploit the benefits of cloud computing is increasing. New challenges to the cloud services discovery areimposed due to the SaaS services unique characteristics such as various and dynamic service offerings andthe lack of standard description language. In this study, we propose OntSaaS, an ontology-based system forSaaS publication and discovery. Ont SaaS standardizes the advertisement process, serves as a semantic-basedcatalogue for the service offerings and provides competent search capabilities for the user. The main buildingblocks of the proposed system are the unified SaaS ontology and a semantic business-oriented matchmakingtechnique that maps requests and offers of cloud SaaS services. The proposed request-service matchmakingalgorithm merges semantic-based services metadata with ontology-based hierarchical matching. Prototypicalimplementation and evaluation of the system proved its performance enhancement in respect of the serviceutility and success rate. Results showed that the concept recommendation approach employed decreased theservice registration process time. Moreover, the proposed matchmaking algorithm similarity results revealedthe actual relevance of the offered services to the user requests. Finally, the proposed ontology-basedexpansion approach for the user request improved the user opportunity to find appropriate services to hisrequirements in case of discovery partial match.