Ontology-Based Automatic Cloud Service Categorization for Enhancing Cloud Service Discovery

Over the past few years, cloud computing has been more and more attractive as a new computing paradigm due to high flexibility for provisioning on-demand computing resources that are used as services through the Internet. In cloud computing, the unique characteristics in cloud services such as dynamic and diverse services offered at different levels, together with the lack of standardized description languages pose significant challenges for effective cloud service discovery. In this paper, we propose a cloud service search engine that exploits a novel ontology-based technique for identifying cloud service categories to improve the accuracy of cloud services searching in real environments. Our approach has the capability to automatically identify and categorize cloud services by detecting cloud service concepts from cloud service sources. Initially, we focus on building the cloud service ontology by using NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology). Then, we utilize our cloud service categorization method to investigate cloud service ontology's concepts in a real-world cloud services dataset which contains the metadata of 5,883 real cloud services. After that, we generate cloud service clusters by using cosine similarity to build the cloud service categorization. Our cloud service categorization is helpful in determining whether a given web source is a cloud service. Furthermore, the new web resource which has been categorized as a cloud service can be used to boost knowledge of cloud service categorization cumulatively. The proposed approach is validated by using real-world cloud services available on the World Wide Web and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach in cloud service discovery.