A Decentralized and Ontology-Based Approach to Infrastructure Monitoring

Abstract: We introduce infrastructure monitoring as an application domain that demands decentralized system designs. This is motivated by the large scale of these systems, the heterogeneity of components and the large number of stakeholders involved. Decentralization aggravates the issue of semantic interoperability, which we propose to tackle with a system information model based on formal ontologies. As a foundation for designing ontology-based infrastructure monitoring systems, we present a layered functional architecture and illustrate potential deployment scenarios. In particular, we detail the decentralized realization of the reasoning layer and describe an algorithm for distributed evaluation of conjunctive queries over distributed knowledge bases. A short description of the prototype implementation and first evaluation results are provided.