Applying an ontology approach to IT service management for business-IT integration

Best practice frameworks focused on the integration of business and IT, such as ITIL, help organizations create and share effective service management. However, guidelines and models are commonly specified using natural language or graphical representations, both lacking the computational semantics needed to enable their automated validation, simulation or execution. This paper presents an ontology approach, which can help service providers add semantics to their service management process models and detect semantic ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions. The proposed ontology draws its knowledge from good practice guidance for ITSM, enabling the current business gap that exists in many IT service providers to be overcome. To do so, service management processes are formalized in terms of an ontology defined using OWL combined with SWRL and SQWRL, the latter two being used to specify constraints and infer new knowledge. Our ontology provides support for executable service models with computational semantics. SWRL rules associated with the ontology can be categorized into three groups: (1) Model consistency; (2) SLA breaches; and (3) Proactive actions. Such rules allow us to better manage actual service management processes which are delivered in line with business needs. Also, the resulting specifications can be shared, reused and interchanged by automated means using e-business frameworks such as ebXML.