A multi-agent-based framework for cloud service discovery and selection using ontology

As cloud computing is getting matured day by day, there has been overwhelming interest among the users to avail a plethora of cloud services. Often, these services appear identical in terms of their functionality though they differ in pricing models, computational power, storage policies and Quality-of-Service parameters making the process of service discovery and selection an intricate task. In the absence of any standard specifications, cloud service providers continue to use their own vocabulary and this further complicates the selection process. Even popular search engines like Google and MSN are not efficient enough to properly identify the most appropriate cloud service that can meet customer requirements. Thus, in the presence of multiple selection parameters and constraints, selecting a required cloud service is a daunting task. In order to address this issue, we work toward developing a reasoning mechanism to optimally resolve the similarities across cloud services by using cloud ontology. A multi-agent-based framework has been proposed for effective cloud service discovery and selection with the help of a standardized service registry and by employing semantically guided searching process.