An OWL ontology to support cloud portability and interoperability

During the past few years, cloud computing has become a key IT buzzword. A growing number of cloud providers started to expose their own services to the market, to answer consumer's need, engaging a competition in the attempt to offer the easiest access to resources and the widest catalogue of services. However, the current lack of a shared standard for the description of such services can represent an obstacle to the development of interoperable and portable cloud solutions. In this scenario, developers could benefit from an automatic tool or technique to identify the architectural solution best answering their requests. In this work we are presenting our approach to the semantic description of cloud resources, comprehending both a general and agnostic representation of such services and a focus on provider specific solutions. Also, we illustrate how the proposed description can be queried and further extended, by means of logical rules, in order to retrieve and assess new information on services equivalences.