Semantic Enhancement for Network Configuration Management

Configuration of network devices is a challenging problem, due to the enormous number of devices and the diversity of parameters not only among different vendors but also among different versions from the same vendor. The remarkable growth in the internet of things (IoT) has contributed more to the heterogeneity of network devices. NETCONF is emerging as a configuration protocol, which makes use of YANG data model to describe network elements to be configured. In this paper, we propose the use of ontology to facilitate the analysis of configuration information of network devices, and simplify of network device configuration. We used the web ontology language (OWL) to form the semantics of the device configuration domain (e.g. switch or router) then we used the yang models of network devices to develop ontology based information extraction. This can be illustrated through the exercises done on various network elements.