Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Towards Semantic Resources in the Cloud
Salvatore F. Pileggi and Carlos Fernandez-Llatas
ITACA-TSB, Universidad Politècnica de Valencia,
Camini de Vera S/N, 46022, Valencia, Spain
salpi@upvnet.upv.es, cfllatas@itaca.upv.es
Abstract.
During the past years, the cloud vision at distributed systems
progressively became the new trend for the next generation platforms. The
advance in the technology, both with the broadband availability and the
explosion of mobile computing, make the massive migration to cloud solution
next to be a fact. The Cloud model assures a new technologic and business
environment for services and applications where competitiveness, scalability
and sustainability converge. On the other hand, next generation applications
have to be able to pervasively meet the needs and requirements deeply different
among them. Applications involving complex virtual organizations require a
higher level of flexibility. An effective approach is based on the convergence
between migration and virtualization. The resource-centric model assumes file
systems, DBs, services and any other class of resources available in the "cloud"
as Virtual Resources. These heterogeneous resources can be managed in a
unique virtual context regardless by the infrastructures on which they are
deployed. Semantics play a critical role in order to assure advanced and open
solutions in a technologic context featured by a fundamental lack of
standardization.
Keywords:
Cloud Computing, Semantic Technologies, Virtual Organization,
Virtualization.
1
Introduction
The popularity of Cloud technologies is constantly increasing as well as the interest
on this emerging market from specialized companies that are already able to offer
several solutions based on different models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS [1].
Even if there are several concerns from involved customers and stakeholders and
open issues (e.g. privacy [2], security [3] and standardization [4]) concerning the
massive migration to the cloud, both private and enterprise cloud solutions are
unanimously considered the "future" of the computation [5].
In practice, the cloud approach is actually referred as the most competitive,
scalable and sustainable solution on the market under the always more realistic
conditions of constantly decreasing bandwidth price and of always connected users.
An exhaustive analysis of technical [1] and business [6] aspects of cloud solutions is
out of paper scope.
This business scenario could quickly change in the next future if the cloud will not
provide high flexible solutions able to meet the needs of complex Virtual Organizations
