Some thoughts …

Just thought I’d christen this group with some tentative ideas (dare I call it a “seeding of our cloud-making efforts”? 🙂 as to directions we might be pursue in the development of cloud-related standards .

These ideas are highly tentative: I definitely welcome feedback, especially from those with more particular expertise in the relevant areas than myself (being none in particular 🙂

First of all, I think we’ll need some type of “engagement” ontology (meaning a description of the ways in which cloud services may be engaged) and a set of polices (possibly in the form of a RIF rule set) detailing the procedure used to select a cloud service or set of services

We’ll also need to think about how we should utilise models in our cloud processing, and how we should represent our models. I think we’ll need to two types of models: a “computational” model (referring to the flow of control of execution within a single type of cloud processor) and a “physical” model (how the configuration of processors, proxies, gateways and sub-clouds combine to collectively implement the cloud’s task).

For such modelling we could use ideas from the XMI model representation (if nothing else, because it’s in XML) within the OMG’s MDA infrastructure, as well as from XProc

However these models are represented, they’ll most likely also need some kind of API representing the execution’s environment which, in the case of the computational model, would represent interfaces to data connections with neighbouring nodes (although I don’t yet know whether these interfaces should be configurable)

I also like the idea of being able to reference related models by URI (with a fragment identifier further locating contained model elements) , which is in keeping with other W3C standards.

The RDF mapping I mentioned in the group’s summary is intended to enable RDF processors to also perform cloud processing, bringing with it the benefit of an existing DOM API for making dynamic changes to models (although this could also be accomplished by other means)

But, as mentioned, these are all tentative ideas, and further input is welcome and encouraged 🙂