ODACE SLA: Ontology Driven Approach for Automatic Establishment of Service Level Agreements

The establishment of Service Level Agreements between service providers and clients remains a complex task regarding the uninterrupted growth of the IT market. In fact, it is important to ensure a clear and fair establishment of these SLAs especially when providers and clients do not share the same technical knowledge. To address this problem, the authors started modeling client intentions and provider offers using ontologies. These models helped them in establishing and implementing a complete semantic matching approach containing four main steps. The first step consists of generating correspondences between the client and the provider terms by assigning certainties for their equivalence. The second step corrects and refines these certainties. In the third step, the authors evaluate the matching results using inference rules, and in the fourth step, a draft version of a Service Level Agreement is automatically generated in case of compatibility. Khalil Drira LAAS-CNRS and Université de Toulouse, France