full title

A quality of service ontology for service-based system specification

keywords

Ontology, quality of service, metrics, taxonomy.

summary

Quality of service (QoS) considerations affect service development in a number of ways. One of the most important is the establishment of semantic meaning upon which to build higher level services. In order to make use of composite workflow systems, negotiation engines, contractual monitoring and service differentiation middleware it is necessary to first enumerate the concepts and phrases used for shared semantic understanding. In addition to providing a simple taxonomy of terms, a QoS ontology must also allow inferences to be made. For example, this could include semantics to indicate that one minute is made up of sixty seconds. In more complex scenarios it could indicate how given metrics are composed, from what sub-metrics / values.

We are in the process of constructing a QoS ontology using the web ontology langauge (OWL), and the Protégé visual design environment. The structure and design of the ontology have been influenced by work put forward in a number of papers and projects, most noticeably in the implementation of parts of Jean-Claude Laprie's dependability classifications.

links

More detail on the QOS ontology (pdf)

PAPERS

Lock R, Dobson G. Developing an ontology for QoS. Conference Proceedings, DIRC Workshop. Nesc (National e-Science centre) Edinburgh 15-17th March 2005. pp128-132. ISBN: 1-86220-159-5

Lock R, Dobson G, Sommerville I. Quality of Service Requirement Specification using an Ontology. Conference Proceedings 1st International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Consequences for Engineering Requirements (SOCCER'05), Paris, 30th August 2005.

Dobson G, Lock R, Sommerville I. QoSOnt: An Ontology for QoS in Service Centric Systems. Conference Proceedings, e-Science All Hands Meeting 2005, Nottingham 18-20th September 2005

Lock R, Dobson G, Sommerville I. QoSOnt: A QoS Ontology for
Service-Centric Systems. Conference Proceedings, EuroMicro 2005, Porto, Portugal, 31st August - 3rd September 2005

Lock R, Dobson G, Sommerville I. Addressing the Contract Issue,
Standardisation for QoS. Conference Proceedings, eChallenge 2005, Ljubliana, Slovakia 19-21st October 2005

author

Russell lock (r dot lock at comp dot lancs dot ac dot uk)