An ontology update mechanism in IaaS service discovery system

Purpose - Hybrid cloud computing is considered a viable and cost-effective approach to satisfy the inability of a private cloud to meet the user requirements. The information status of the selected public cloud service may change at runtime which should be reflected at the broker server database. This research illustrates a mechanism to assist the IaaS discovery system to assess the status change of the selected public cloud service and to update the broker server database. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - A prototype was developed with the broker server as the main component in the service discovery system containing the status information of the selected public cloud service. The merge-ontology and patch-update methods were proposed, the processing cost details of each were measured, and the methods were evaluated. Findings - Experimental results showed that in the merge update, the merging process incurred much longer time than its required communication, contributing to long overall time. Relatively, the patch update method incurred much less time than its counterpart. Research limitations/implications - The proposed mechanism is experimental with some ideal assumptions, and so further work in real conditions is needed for its improvement. Originality/value - This research is believed to be the first proposal to investigate ontology merge/patch methods to support ontology update in the broker server database of a hybrid cloud and will serve as a reference to researchers in the field.