NARATICH NA-LAMPANG WIWAT VATANAWOOD

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1 ECAI International Conference 8th Edition Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence 30 June -02 July, 2016, Ploiesti, ROMÂNIA Development of an Ontology-Based Configuration Management System NARATICH NA-LAMPANG Department of Computer Engineering Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University Thailand Naratich.N@Student.chula.ac.th WIWAT VATANAWOOD Department of Computer Engineering Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University Thailand Wiwat@chula.ac.th Abstract This paper proposes an alternative of configuration management system development using IT ontology and semantic technology. To make the IT service management more effective especially the configuration management, the manager needs the appropriate and ad-hoc analysis for decision making. Our approach proposes a knowledge base to accompany the conventional database system in order to flexibly cope with the strategic problems. An ontology schema is designed to handle the configuration management of IT service resources in term of RDF N-triple. The classes and hierarchy of the schema are provided along with the appropriate property relations among the configuration items. We design the queries by SWRL & SQWRL rules for IT service functions, such as how to allocate the budget for the annual maintenance fee, etc. The Protege software is used during our ontology schema design. We develop a Java web application with Jena Framework along with the Jena Fuseki ontology server to successfully demonstrate our ontology-based approach. Keywords-Ontology; IT Service Management; CMDB; Configuration Management; SWRL; SQWRL; OWL; Jena; SPARQL I. INTRODUCTION Today most organizations are completely dependent on IT to enable them to achieve their company visions, business strategies and goals. The IT service management is essential to ensure these achievements and business benefits from IT and provide the ability to carry out the core business value to client. The configuration management is one of the IT service management commitments to handle the operations and maintain the IT core resources. The configuration management database (CMDB) is a conceptual IT model in configuration management system, which is indispensable for efficient IT service management. Without the effective CMDB, it is difficult to understand and manage the IT core assets and resources in IT environment. However, the implementation of CMDB is difficult because of its complex and dynamic properties [1]. The status of the configuration items keep changing during the daily operations. While, the ontology is suggested to be considered when data schema is large and complex or difficult to query [2]. In practice, to build ontologybased CMDB which is flexible and has potential to store complex knowledge is our intention. This stored knowledge base yields several advantages such as performing data analysis and predictive analytics by tracing the information and relationship among infrastructure, document items and work processes. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 covers the backgrounds and related works. In section 3, we present our ontology-based software development. Next, in section 4, we demonstrate a case study of configuration management system and finally, section 5 describes our conclusions. II. BACKGROUNDS AND THE RELATED WORKS A. IT Service Management (ITSM) ITSM [3] is the implementation and management of quality IT services. It meets the needs of the business and performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology. Although there are a variety of standards and frameworks such COBIT, ISO/IEC 20000, ITIL, CMMI for Services. ITSM is often comparable to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). B. Configuration Management (CM) Configuration Management defined by ITIL [3] is the process responsible for maintaining information about Configuration Items required to deliver an IT Service, including their Relationships. This information is managed throughout the Lifecycle of the Configuration Items. The purpose of Configuration Management [4] is to establish and maintain the integrity of work products. The Configuration Management process area involves the follow activities: 1) Identifying configuration Items. 2) Control changes to configuration Items. 3) Building or providing specification to build work product from the Configuration Management System. 4) Maintaining the integrity of baseline. 5) Providing accurate status and configuration data to develops, end users and customers.

2 2 Naratich Na-Lampang, Wiwat Vatanawood The CMDB is a core database of the ITSM mentioned. The CMDB collects the details of the organization's elements that are used in the provision and management of its IT services. It is beyond an asset database as it contains information relating to the maintenance, movement, and problems experienced with the configuration items. The CMDB also contains the wide range of information including hardware, software, and documentation. In the context of ITIL, a CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the significant components of the IT environment. A key goal of CMDB is to help an organization understand the relationships between different components and track their configuration. The CMDB is a fundamental component of the ITIL framework's Configuration Management process. CMDB implementations may integrate with change management, knowledge management and authorization. C. Ontology and the Development Framework Ontology [5] is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain. It essentially defines the structure of knowledge for various domains. In the business domain context, the nouns represent classes of objects and the verbs represent relation between objects. The RDF N-triple is the fundamental element describing the ontology. Recently, Web Ontology Language (OWL) [6] is introduced as a semantic web language to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things. OWL is part of the W3C's semantic web technology stack. To utilize the RDF/OWL knowledge concepts, the SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language) [7] is built on the ancestor called SWRL rule language. It effectively provides a pattern specification for OWL query. For the ontology practitioners, Protege software [8] is an ontology editor and framework for building intelligent systems. Protege software provides a graphical user interface to define the ontology schema and its populations called individuals. It also includes deductive classifiers to validate that working ontologies are consistent. It possibly infers new information based on the analysis of the existing ontology. When it comes to develop an application, Jena [9] is a Java framework for building semantic web applications. The Jena is an extensive Java library for developers to easily handle RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. While, Jena Fuseki is a SPARQL server that provides REST-style SPARQL HTTP update, SPARQL query, and SPARQL update using the SPARQL protocol over HTTP. D. Related Works The CMDB with a large amount of CIs is difficult and complex because of its properties and relationships so that [1] introduced the CMDB patterns which use Fowler's Analysis patterns [10] to help design CMDB information model. The mentioned patterns offer a good utility and maintenance ratio and limit the complexity of the resulting CMDB. While, [11] presented an evolution of a SCM Ontology that could be used as a reference model for understanding software domain and also introduced the taxonomy of change control actions. According to the ontology concepts, several researches [12, 13, 14, 15] applied ontology techniques alone for designing ITSM. [16] presented in further, an ontology model to design IT Service Configuration Management. In accordance with the work by analyzing business processes and concept model that uses ontology help manage and visualize the relationship of business, people, processes, equipment and technology, Also, [17] designed ontology-based CMDB for their Automatic Population and Updating of a Semantic Wiki-based Configuration Management Database. They designed configuration item ontology for software and hardware components, gathering data from WMI infrastructure and automatically update relevant information to CMDB. While, [18] presented a prototype of ontology-based model for IT Governance. They designed ontological model for configuration items and elements of a process. Their goal was to support the handling of several systems spread throughout the enterprise in a comprehensive, wide and unique view. III. OUR ONTOLOGY-BASED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT In this section, we describe the steps to define, design, and develop an ontology-based software. In this case, we develop ontology-based configuration management system which including CMDB and tool. The overview of our ontology-based software development is depicted in Fig. 1. Figure 1. Our Ontology-based Software Development The first step is to identify our domain requirements, in this case the configuration items which are the essential CMDB elements. In short, we have to define a set of basic configuration items to be collected, stored, and analyzed in the ad-hoc analysis. The ontology schema which is the structure of the ontology, is then designed according to the identified configuration items (CI) and its CI template. Building the ontology and populating RDF/OWL N-triple data would be the next step. We are now defining a set of SWRL & SQWRL rules to provide the initial complex and data analytic queries. The Protege software works very well for us in this step. When the initial ontology

3 Development of an Ontology-Based Configuration Management System 3 model for configuration management system is complete and ready, the semantic web application development begins. A. Identify Configuration Item (CI) This step is to identify the necessary CIs to establish a baseline set of our ontology-based system. According to the Specific Goal 1 of Configuration Management (CM) process area in CMMI for Services [4], it recommends to do "Specific Practice Identify Configuration Items" and guides how to select the CIs. The rules to select the appropriate CIs are listed as follows. 1) The CI is from a group of two or more groups. 2) The CI which has the work conditions are expected to change frequently, probably because of errors or demand changes. 3) The CI which has the work conditions that are dependent on each other if there is a change of job, it will affect the work of another. 4) The CI which has the work conditions that is critical to the success of the work. We consider Configuration Item as result in Table I. In order to identify the configuration items, we consider the candidate CIs from our case study of banking company. We evaluate the CIs according to the "Specific Practice Identify Configuration Items" [4] and the result checklist is shown in Table I. In our configuration management system, we categorize the CIs into four groups - Hardware, Software, Document, and ITSM support group. 1) Assign the classes for CI types. In this case, we assign classes including Project, Server, CPU, Disk, Ram, Application Software, System Software, etc. shown as the rectangle boxes in Fig. 2. 2) Assign the data property for each class according to its original CI type. The data properties are the attributes of the class in the schema. For example, we assign the data properties for class Server as follows - ID, Name, IsVirtualize, IsSharedServer, etc. 3) Assign the object property for each pair of classes according to its relation between CI types. The object property is the relationship between two classes in the schema. For example, we assign the object properties called HasComponent between class Server and class CPU. The overall ontology schema is depicted in Fig. 2, which eleven classes and ten object properties links or relations are drawn. The class Project is the most generic class of the schema. TABLE I. THE RESULT OF THE CI EVALUATION CHECKLISTS FROM THE CI SELECTION RULES Configuration Rule 1 Rule 2 Rule 3 Rule 4 Item Project System Software Application Software Server Disk Ram CPU Test Specification Requirement Specification Work Department Person Change Request Incident B. Design Ontology Schema In this step, we use Protege software to construct our ontology schema shown in Fig. 2. We propose these step-by-step guidelines to gradually build the final ontology schema. Figure 2. Ontology Schema of Our Configuration Items C. Build Ontology Data Given the ontology schema for the configuration items from the previous step, we now populate the individuals for the classes and properties. We also use the Protege software to initially populate the ontology data. Moreover, we design a set of SWRL & SQWRL rules for IT services functions and the sample of the rules to query project s information as shown in Table II. The ontology data is then exported into an XML/OWL format and uploaded to be stored as a dataset on Jena Fuseki which is one of our ontology servers. The sample of XML/OWL data is shown in Fig. 3.

4 4 Naratich Na-Lampang, Wiwat Vatanawood SWRL SQWRL TABLE II. SWRL & SQWRL RULES Rule 1:To define associate from project to aggregation component CI:Uses(?x,?y)^CI:HasComponent(?y,?z) CI:IsAssociateWith(?x,?z) Rule 2: To define which server is shared server. CI:Server(?x) CI:Uses(?y,?x) sqwrl:makeset(?s,?y) sqwrl:groupby(?s,?x) sqwrl:size(?n,?s) swrlb:greaterthan(?n, 1) CI:IsSharedServer(?x, true) Rule 3:To query project lists CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) sqwrl:select(?x) Rule 4:To query Change in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:HasChange(?x,?y) CI:ChangeStatus(?y, "A") sqwrl:select(?x,?y) Rule 5:To query document in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:HasDocument(?x,?y) CI:HasComponent(?y,?z) sqwrl:select(?x,?y,?z) Rule 6:To query Incident in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:HasIncident(?x,?y) CI:IncidentStatus(?y, "A") sqwrl:select(?x,?y) Rule 7:To query Server and it component in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:Server(?y) CI:Uses(?x,?y) CI:HasComponent(?y,?z) sqwrl:select(?x,?y,?z) Rule 8:To query Cost Installation in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:Uses(?x,?y) CI:CostInstall(?y,?c) CI:CostInstall(?x,?c2) sqwrl:select(?x) sqwrl:sum(?c) sqwrl:select(?c2) Rule 9:To query Cost Maintenance in project CI:Project(?x) CI:AppID(?x,?i) CI:Uses(?x,?y) CI:CostMaintenance(?y,?c) CI:CostMaintenance(?x,?c2) sqwrl:select(?x) sqwrl:sum(?c) sqwrl:select(?c2) <owl:namedindividual rdf:about=" M"> <rdf:type rdf:resource=" <HasChange rdf:resource=" "/> <HasDocument rdf:resource=" ATM"/> <HasIncident rdf:resource=" "/> <Uses rdf:resource=" ATMBackend"/> <Uses rdf:resource=" ATMSoftwareFront"/> <Uses rdf:resource=" APP01"/> <AppID rdf:datatype=" 002</AppID><ID rdf:datatype=" 002</ID> <Name rdf:datatype=" M System</Name> </owl:namedindividual> D. Develop Semantic Web Application In this step, the semantic web application is developed using Jena framework and Fuseki server. The ontology-based data and the related rules which are initially prepared from the previous step and uploaded on Fuseki are ready to be accessed. The query is commonly in the form of SPARQL query. We intend to systematically implement the semantic web application conforming the Jena framework. Therefore, every SPARQL query would be issued via Ontology API of the Jena framework. As shown in Fig. 4, the Fuseki server provides the seamless connections from our application through the ontology-based data. Our semantic web application offers three main functions as follows. 1) Create a new CI - a new individual of the CI class is created and stored into the ontology-base dataset. The relevant data properties and object properties are handled properly. 2) Modify a CI - an existing individual of CI class is kept as the old version and the new updated individual is replaced. We provide the version control for any modification of any particular CI as well. A new object property called IsNewVersionOf is designed to access back to the previous available versions. 3) Remove a CI - an existing individual of CI class is removed permanently from the ontologybased data. However, it is crucial to provide the cascading remove to the aggregate CI. The aggregate CI is the one individual CI that carries a set of independent individuals, such as one individual Server1 carries the independent individuals including CPU1, Disk1, and RAM1. Whenever the individual Server1 is removed then the rest of its independents are removed right the way. Figure 4. Application architecture Figure 3. Ontology Schema of Our Configuration Items

5 IV. Development of an Ontology-Based Configuration Management System 5 CASE STUDY We demonstrate a case study of configuration management system of a banking system. In practical, both primitive configuration items and the aggregate configuration items are concerned in our ontology schema design. The banking system has more than one project which has their own set of hardware, software, and document whilst sharing some particular ones. By using our proposed ontology schema earlier, the ontology individuals are drawn in Fig. 5. In this figure, Project_ATM uses software SSW-OS-Linux1.0, ASW-ATMSoftwareFront, ASW- ATMBackend, and uses LINATMAPP01 server which consists of Ram-LINATMAPP01-01, CPU- LINATMAPP01-01 and Dsk-LINATMAPP Project_ATM also have incident Inc and Change Request Chg Figure 6. Sample result of querying the project. Figure 7. Sample result of Change Request Impact Analysis Figure 5. Sample of the ontology individuals of Our proposed CM System We also demonstrate a resulting ad-hoc query of the investment status of Project_ATM. The Project_ATM has been assigned with the CIs shown as a hierarchical tree in Fig. 6. The tree is understandable and varied according to the current ontology RDF data from the SPARQL query. We also calculate the investment status of the initial installation cost and the maintenance budget of the total resources of Project_ATM and do impact analysis as shown in Fig. 7. The impact analysis reports all of the directly impacted projects and their ripple effects if we apply the change request. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to accompany to the database system of CMDB for ITSM services and we demonstrate a case study of configuration management system of a banking system. An ontology schema is designed to cope with four categories of the CIs - Hardware, Software, Document, and ITSM support. Our ontology schema provides classes and their hierarchy along with the relevant data properties and object properties completely. Both primitive CI and aggregate CI are supported in our schema design as well. Moreover, the version control of the CIs is concerned as the IsNewVersionOf property is provided to practically link between the current and previous version of any particular CI. The ontology based web application is developed using Jena Framework and Jena Fuseki ontology server to demonstrate our ontology-based approach of configuration management system.

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