Towards ontology-enhanced cloud services discovery

Cloud computing provides high flexibility with regard to ondemand computer resources that are used as services through the Internet. However, searching cloud services still remains a challenge due to their unique characteristics such as dynamic and diverse services offering at different levels, as well as the lack of standardized description languages. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to support cloud services discovery based on a comprehensive ontology. More specifically, our approach has the capability to semi-automatically generate the ontology by mining new concepts from documents related to cloud services. Starting from an initial ontology based on the NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) cloud computing standard, our approach analyzes a real-world cloud service dataset of 5,883 to build the cloud service ontology by identifying and adding new cloud services related concepts. The proposed approaches have been validated by a prototype system and experimental studies.