Edinburgh Napier University

  Cloud computing (CC) is a revolutionary paradigm of consuming Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services. However, while trying to find the optimal services, many users often feel confused due to the inadequacy of service information description. Although some efforts are made in the semantic modelling, retrieval and recommendation of cloud services, existing practices would only work effectively for certain restricted scenarios to deal for example with basic and non-interactive service specifications. In the meantime, various service management tasks are usually performed individually for diverse cloud resources for distinct service providers. This results into significant decreased effectiveness and efficiency for task implementation. Fundamentally, it is due to the lack of a generic service management interface which enables a unified service access and manipulation regardless of the providers or resource types.
To address the above issues, the thesis proposes a semantic-driven framework, which integrates two main novel specification approaches, known as agility-oriented and fuzziness-embedded cloud service semantic specifications, and cloud service access and manipulation request operation specifications. These consequently enable comprehensive service specification by capturing the in-depth cloud concept details and their interactions, even across multiple service categories and abstraction levels. Utilising the specifications as CC knowledge foundation, a unified service recommendation and management platform is implemented. Based on considerable experiment data collected on real-world cloud services, the approaches demonstrate distinguished effectiveness in service search, retrieval and recommendation tasks whilst the platform shows outstanding performance for a wide range of service access, management and interaction tasks. Furthermore, the framework includes two sets of innovative specification processing algorithms specifically designed to serve advanced CC tasks: while the fuzzy rating and ontology evolution algorithms establish a manner of collaborative cloud service specification, the service orchestration reasoning algorithms reveal a promising means of dynamic service compositions.