Presentation at the UCL Autonomic Workshop

Located in UCL, the Autonomics Workshop was a forum for industry and academia to discuss ongoing research and future challenges associated to realising Autonomic inspired network management solutions.
As part of WP3, a presentation was given by Steven Davy describing the experience gained during the project concerning the usage of the Information Model results of task 3.1. The presentation given is located here.
The objective of the presentation was to instill in the audience an appreciation of using a rich information model, in our case DEN-ng, to provide input to autonomic decision making algorithms. This tutorial style presentation raised some interesting discussion among the audience and provided some very useful feedback to the task partners.
Feedback:
Q: Can a complete Ontology driven approach be taken as opposed to a model driven approach?
A: The answer is no, because both UML based models and Ontology graphs are required to develop a rounded solution that takes into account software processes (UML) and reasoning/learning processes (Ontology).
Q: Is UML too restrictive a modelling tool to support evolution of the Information model once the system is built?
A: Evolution of the information model is a difficult challenge and is currently still a challenge. Supporting model changes depend on the application being supported, for example in database systems, a database schema migration process must be developed to map the old data into the new schema. In Ruby on Rails application this process in builtin. Interestingly, OWL based ontologies have support for versioning; however, this is not very elegant and mappings are still required.
Q: How do you support the learning of new relationships that may invalidate some relationships defined in the model?
A: Again this is a future challenge, and the solution lies in augmenting the information model with ontologies that can be readily modified and extended at runtime should new relationships need to be supported.