An ontology-based approach to the description and execution of composite network management processes for network monitoring

Abstract

Web service technology has been proposed to implement management interfaces of managed resources. These web services can usually be combined to perform composite processes. These composite processes can be defined with service ontologies such as OWL-S, which allows their formal description. However, other technologies, including the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), provide more mature execution engines. This paper presents an approach to define and execute composite network management processes with existing technology. For this, a use case is developed in which a set of web service interfaces are defined for a network probe, and a composite process is specified using OWL-S to monitor the network load. Then, this specification is later translated to WSBPEL and interpreted by a real execution engine. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.