Ontology-Based Network Planning

This article describes an approach to building and using a Network Ontology (NO) for network planning projects with particular focus on real-life enterprise networks. In addition to the ontology, we have developed a Network Markup Language (NML) based on the ontology that can be used to describe real life networks. We have also developed network patterns that capture the most common and best practices in network design and represented them in the proposed NML. Finally, we have developed a Web-based tool that uses the NO, NML and network patterns to quickly generate network plans for given situations. The practical contribution of this article is that it ties ontologies to the practice of network planning and network patterns, including decisions such as network device selection.