Understanding Software Provisioning: An Ontological View

In the areas involving data relatedness analysis and big data processing (such as information retrieval and data mining) one of common ways to test developed algorithms is to deal with their software implementations. Deploying software as services is one of possible ways to support better access to research algorithms, test collections and third party components as well as their easier distribution. While provisioning software to computing clouds researchers often face difficulties in process of software deployment. Most research software programs utilize different types of unified interface; among them there are many desktop command-line console applications which are unsuitable for execution in networked or distributed environments. This significantly complicates the process of distributing research software via computing clouds. As a part of knowledge driven approach to provisioning CLI software in clouds we introduce a novel subject domain ontology which is purposed to describe and support processes of software building, configuration and execution. We pay special attention to the process of fixing recoverable build and execution errors automatically. We study how ontologies targeting specific build and runtime environments can be defined by using the software provisioning ontology as a conceptual core. We examine how the proposed ontology can be used in order to define knowledge base rules for an expert system controlling the process of provisioning applications to computing clouds and making them accessible as web services.