PaaSport semantic model: An ontology for a platform-as-a-service semantically interoperable marketplace

PaaS is a Cloud computing service that provides a computing platform to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of infrastructure maintenance. SMEs are reluctant to enter the growing PaaS market due to the possibility of being locked in to a certain platform, mostly provided by the market's giants. The PaaSport Marketplace aims to avoid the provider lock-in problem by allowing Platform provider SMEs to roll out semantically interoperable PaaS offerings and Software SMEs to deploy or migrate their applications on the best-matching offering, through a thin, non-intrusive Cloud broker. In this paper, we present the PaaSport semantic model, namely an OWL ontology, extension of the DUL ontology. The ontology is used for semantically representing (a) PaaS offering capabilities and (b) requirements of applications to be deployed. The ontology has been designed to optimally support a semantic matchmaking and ranking algorithm that recommends the best-matching PaaS offering to the application developer. The DUL ontology offers seamless extensibility, since both PaaS Characteristics and parameters are defined as classes; therefore, extending the ontology with new characteristics and parameters requires the addition of new specialized subclasses of the already existing classes, which is less complicated than adding ontology properties. The PaaSport ontology is evaluated through verification tools, competency questions, human experts, application tasks and query performance tests.