AutoI Information Model

The AutoI Information Model (AIM) has been defined so that, in conjunction with other knowledge representations (such as ontologies), it provides a common language to represent the concepts, characteristics and behaviour required for the self-management of the virtualised networks. It serves to capture all necessary concepts concerned with service-oriented virtual resource orchestration and their relationships. An information model can be defined as a “representation of the characteristics and behaviour of a component or system independent of vendor, platform, language, and repository”. The use of a single information model will enable multiple platform- and language-specific data models to be built that each have a common understanding of shared data. The AutoI Information Model uses a set of abstractions and software patterns that enable services to express their needs to the management overlay, which translates those needs into a form that the network can understand.
The DEN-ng Information Model was chosen as the core for the AutoI Information Model extending it as required to support aspects such as support for virtualised network support. By complementing the model with a set of domain-specific ontologies that then can be used as a common language to advance interoperability and understanding across the disparate components of the AutoI architecture. In the same way, the common language enables network resources to be defined in such a way that the services can work with and use them. This common language becomes the base for a set of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) which addresses the specific tasks of the framework while still enabling interoperability.

This briefly summarises why AutoI defined an Information Model in the first year of the project. As this work is main activity of TSSG within the project, I will look at the IM in more depth in the future. More information about the Information Model can be found in D3.1 Information Model.