Resource specification and intelligent user interaction for federated testbeds using Semantic Web technologies

In this paper we present the Testbed-as-a-Service with Ontology Repository (TaaSOR) platform that facilitates a community-based approach to building an infrastructure for the management and federation of heterogeneous networking testbeds in a bottom-up fashion. This platform provides semantically annotated services and experiments with automated transformation from other semi-structured data sources and a set of tools that enables a community of developers and experimenters to develop and modify ontologies which constitute the foundation of the platform. The platform also includes an ontology repository that enables persistence, publishing and management of the accumulated semantics in a transparent way based on ontologies and Linked Data represented in standardized formats. Positive feedback loops engineered in the platform lower the barrier for testbed operators for participation in a federation, reduce the barrier of entry for experimenters without expert domain knowledge, lower operational overhead for developers, and streamline operation for system administrators. As a proof of concept, the TaaSOR instance is applied to the ORBIT testbed and the corresponding OMF management framework to test the proposed platform in an environment used by a large number of researchers worldwide.