Semantic Management Information Modeling based on Theory of Concept Lattices

Published Online December 2010 in MECS

• I.    Introduction

  Since US government declared the startup of Next Generation Internet (NGI) [1] plan in 1996, aiming to study basic theories for new generation computer information networks and establish a brand-new Internet architecture, there is an increasing interest by research and industry in future Internet and its management. In the USA, there are initiatives like Future Internet Design (FIND) [2] and Globe Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) [3]. In Europe, there is the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) [4] program. And in China, there is the China Next Generation Internet (CNGI) [5] project.

As an important research area, network management should be an indispensable part for the design of future Internet, instead of being a post-accession function in the traditional sense. As to future Internet, network management deals with not only existing conventional managed objects but also new ones including content and context, while the interoperability problem of multiple network management domains becomes more prominent.

Meanwhile, there is an urgent need to address two main problems of information modeling in the field of network management, which are the lack of conformance and low level of formalization. Hence, it is of great

This paper is an extended version of the conference paper titled A Granular Computing View for Unified Information Modeling in Network Management Domain published by CNMT2010.

significance to study how to realize unified management information modeling, in order to avoid a lot of repetitive work and standardize information modeling for the sack of network management domain.

On the syntax level, management information can not make full use of all the functions and expressive abilities of regulated information specification languages, lacking semantic understandings. In most cases, it is quite essential to study information mediation for network management. And the main reason for this is that, the problem of semantic interoperability is not well solved during the process of developing useful abstractions for physical and logical features of network entities by current network management standards.

Recently, studies on semantic interoperability for network management information and its specification usually focus on ontology. Ontology [6] [7] plays an important role in Semantic Web, and the most general definition of ontology may be that, an ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization . It may be quite useful to apply ontology description languages such as Web Ontology Language (OWL) [8] for special management information mediation problems. However, when describing general management information and their relations by methods in virtue of special languages, it may possibly lack essential systematization and feasibility, not to mention the building of a unified framework.

Philosophically speaking, permanent relationship of Managed Objects (MOs) is always described by not-lasting terms, such as OWL. The fact is that, these terms reflect not only the characteristics of the times but also the fashion of the designers or a particular organization. Furthermore, the structure described by syntax and the one revealed by metaphysics are consistent. In other words, the latter one is just a reconstruction of the former one. One example for this kind of relationship is a Management Information Base (MIB) definition and the corresponding MIB tree. Thus in this case, theory of concept lattices is introduced to network management domain for the purpose of semantic information modeling in a unified manner.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II presents related work. Section III establishes an ontology-driven framework for semantic management information modeling. Section IV builds unified management information modeling ontology based on concept lattices. Section V discusses the solution for generating semantic models for network management information modeling using the theory of concept lattices. Section VI concludes this paper and prospects future work.

• II.    Related Work

Taking the problem of unified information modeling for network management into consideration, current studies are generally divided into two main directions.

• A.    Proposal of a Unified Standard

One direction for unified information modeling in the field of network management is to propose a unified standard, such as SMIng [9] suggested by Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), YANG [10] by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Common Information Model (CIM) [11] by Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and so on.

Especially, Reference [12] argues that, the development of information models for important element types may do favor to managers for the access of standard managed objects through a standardized style.

• B.    Integration in a Unified Manner