Linked USDL Business Policy Specifications as WS-Agreement Templates

With the increasing adoption of cloud computing, the enterprise IT environment is progressively transformed into a complex ecosystem of diverse interrelated services typically delivered by a multitude of providers. Such complexity calls for service governance and quality control activities. Ideally, such activities must be performed in a generic and platform-agnostic manner, one which demands an ontology-based approach for the specification and enforcement of the relevant governance policies and the service-level objectives that they entail. At the same time, such governance policies must be expressed in a suitable serialisation format in order to be exposed to the relevant stakeholders and, ultimately, form the basis of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This paper presents an approach for the automatic translation of governance policies expressed in Linked USDL, our chosen ontological framework, into WS-Agreement templates.