Creating a semantically-enhanced cloud services environment through ontology evolution

Currently, the availability of Web resources has grown enormously to the point that whatever a user needs at a given moment can potentially be found on the Internet. These resources are not limited to data items anymore, functionality delivered through some sort of service architectural model is also offered on the Internet. In the last few years, cloud computing has emerged as one of the most popular computing models to provide services over the Internet. However, as the number of available cloud services increases, the problem of service discovery and selection arises. Experience indicates that semantic technologies can provide the basis for enhanced and more precise search processes. In this paper, we present a platform that makes use of semantic technologies and techniques to facilitate the discovery of cloud resources meeting the users' needs. We propose an architecture that puts together semantic annotation techniques, ontology evolution, term extraction and indexing resources to semantically annotate cloud services, and a semantic search engine that leverages the semantic description of the cloud resources to find them from keyword-based searches. A comprehensive evaluation of the tool in the ICT domain has produced very promising results and is also presented in this article.