David Trastour

Lifting XML Schema to OWL

The Semantic Web will allow software agents to understand and reason about data provided by Web applications. Unfortunately, formal ontologies, needed to express data semantics, are often not readily available. However, common data schemas can help to create ontologies. We propose mappings from XML Schema to OWL as well as XML to RDF and show how web engineering can benefit from the gained expressiveness as well as the use of inference services.

Semantic web support for the business-to-business e-commerce lifecycle

If an e-services approach to electronic commerce is to become widespread, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. By using DAML, we develop a service description language sufficiently expressive and flexible to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries, negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols, and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.

IT service management driven by business objectives An application to incident management

In this paper we address the problem of ensuring business-IT alignment. We describe a method and a system for decision support in IT service management driven by alignment with the business objectives of the enterprise that the IT supports. Our technical proposition, called IT management by business objectives (MBO) is applicable to most of the domains of IT service management, such as incident management, change management, and others. The technology consists of some components that are reusable across domains, together with guidelines and patterns for building complementary components in order to develop domain-specific solutions

A decision support tool to optimize scheduling of IT changes

Change management is one of the most critical processes in IT management. Some of the reasons are the sheer number of changes and the difficulty of evaluating the impact of changes on the IT services being provided. Through carrying out a survey with IT managers and practitioners, we have found that, among the activities performed during change management, change scheduling (allocating changes to change windows) is the most problematic one. In this paper we solve the change scheduling problem by using a business-driven approach that evaluates the impact of a change schedule in terms of the financial loss imposed on the service provider. Toward this aim, we model the impact of SLA violations when the implementation of changes is done after their deadline. A change scheduling optimization problem is then formalized and its solution is applied to a typical scenario. The results show that optimizing the scheduling of changes can result in significant savings to an IT support organization.

Semantic Web support for the business-to-business e-commerce pre-contractual lifecycle

If an e-services approach to electronic commerce is to become widespread, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. DAML+OIL is a sufficiently expressive and flexible service description language to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries, negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols, and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.

Performance monitoring of service-level agreements for utility computing using the event calculus

Utility computing (UC) is concerned with the provisioning of computational resources (compute-power, storage, network bandwidth), on a per-need basis, to corporate businesses. Service-level agreements (SLAs) - contracts between a provider and a customer - are a sine qua non in the deployment of UC. A crucial stage in the life-cycle of contracts (such as SLAs) is their automated performance monitoring while active; a significant aspect of which concerns the tracking of contract state. In this work, we define an ontology to capture aspects of SLAs that are pertinent to the tracking of state for performance monitoring, and generalise these aspects so that the ontology may be applicable to other contract domains. The ontology is formalised as an XML-based language, called CTXML (contract tracking XML). The semantics for CTXML are presented in terms of a computational model based on the event calculus.

A template-based solution to support knowledge reuse in IT change design

Capturing and reusing the experience of operators in implementing IT changes is an important aspect of IT service management, as it may result in fewer incidents (upon change execution) and faster specification of change plans, to mention just a few potential advantages. Nevertheless, in practice, changes are usually described and documented in an ad hoc fashion, due to the lack of proper support to assist the design process. This hampers knowledge acquired when specifying, planning, and carrying out previous changes to be reused in subsequent requests. In order to address this issue, we propose the use of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and reuse the experience accumulated within organizations in relation to IT changes. Our solution is analyzed through a prototypical implementation of a change management system and a case study based on a real-life scenario.

Enabling rollback support in IT change management systems

The current research on IT change management has been exploring several aspects of this new discipline, but it usually assumes that changes expressed in requests for change (RFC) documents will be successfully executed over the managed IT infrastructure. This assumption, however, is not realistic in actual IT systems because failures during the execution of changes do happen and cannot be ignored. In order to address this issue, we propose a solution where tightly-related change activities are grouped together forming atomic groups of activities. These groups are atomic in the sense that if one activity fails, all other already executed activities of the same group must rollback to move the system backwards to the previous state. The automation of change rollback is especially convenient because it relieves the IT human operator of manually undoing the activities of a change group that has failed. To prove concept and technical feasibility, we have materialized our solution in a prototype system that, using elements of the business process execution language (BPEL), is able to control how atomic groups of activities must be handled in IT change management systems.

ChangeLedge: Change design and planning in networked systems based on reuse of knowledge and automation

Proper management of Information Technology (IT) resources and services has become imperative for the success of modern organizations. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) represents, in this context, the most widely accepted framework to help achieve this end. Among the processes that compose ITIL, change management has an important role in defining best practices and processes for the efficient and prompt handling of IT changes. In practice, however, such changes are usually described and documented in an ad hoc fashion, due to the lack of proper support to assist the design process. This hampers knowledge acquired when specifying, planning, and carrying out previous changes to be reused in subsequent requests, even though such reuse may result in fewer incidents and faster specification of change plans. To address this problem, in this paper we present a conceptual solution to support the design and planning of IT changes and explore the concept of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and (re)use knowledge in the specification of (recurrent and similar) IT changes. To prove concept and technical feasibility of the proposed solution, we have developed a prototypical implementation of a change management system called ChangeLedge and used it to carry out a set of experiments, considering typical IT changes. The results obtained indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the system, which is able to generate accurate and actionable change plans in substantially less time than would be spent by a skilled human operator.

Improving IT Change Management Processes with Automated Risk Assessment

The rational management of IT infrastructures is a goal of modern organizations that aim to deliver high quality services to their customers in an affordable way. Since changes are imminent in such a dynamic environment, failures during this process may directly affect business continuity. Hence, risk assessment is a key process in IT change management. Despite its importance, risks are usually assessed by humans based on empirical knowledge, leading to inaccurate basis for decision making. In this paper, we present a solution for automating the risk assessment process, which combines historical data from previous changes and analyzes impact of changes over affected elements. A prototypical system was developed to evaluate the solution on an emulated IT infrastructure. The results achieved show how the automated solution is capable of raising the quality of changes, therefore reducing service disruption caused by changes.