A business ontology to enable semantic matchmaking in open cloud markets

Over the past few years, an increasing number of organizations have been considering the use of some form of cloud computing for their business purpose. However, the market of cloud resources is still in its infancy due to, among other reasons, the lack of interoperability among existing cloud platforms. In this paper we argue that a successful open cloud market needs a flexible and powerful way to express actors' requirements. In order to address this issue, we developed a set of ontologies to capture and express the business aspects of providers' offerings and customers' requests. To the best of our knowledge this is one of the first attempt to build a cloud ontology focused on business related concepts rather than on technical aspects. The ontology discussed here is just the first step of our work: the final aim is to define an exhaustive set of business-oriented requirements to support the implementation of a semantic cloud resource publish/discovery mechanism.