iAgree studio: A platform to edit and validate WS-agreement documents

Abstract

The widespread use of SLA-regulated Cloud services, in which the violation of SLA terms may imply a penalty for the parties, have increased the importance and complexity of systems supporting the SLA lifecycle. Although these systems can be very different from each other, ranging from service monitoring platforms to auto-scaling solutions according to SLAs, they all share the need of having machine-processable and semantically valid SLAs. In this paper we present iAgree studio, the first application, up to our knowledge, that is able to edit and semantically validate agreement documents that are compliant with the WS-Agreement specification by checking properties such as its consistency, and the compliance between templates and agreement offers. In addition, it reports explanations when documents are not valid. Moreover, it allows users to combine the validation and explanation operations by means of a scenarios developer. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.