Ontologies for platform as service APIs interoperability

Abstract

Ontologies can be used to describe common cloud functionalities and enable common terminology to assist in cloud interoperability. In this work, we have developed the ontology for resources and operations and the ontology of interoperability problems. The aim is to clearly describe and categorize the existing functionalities, features and specificities of commercial platform as a service offers. The first ontology also provides data type mappings among different PaaS storages and cross-PaaS data types used in inputs and outputs of the remote API operations to provide a common layer for information exchange and data migration among different PaaS providers. The ontologies were evaluated by tools and by human experts. Furthermore, the ontologies were used in cloud interoperability prototype to show their practical applicability.