R. State et al. (Eds.): DSOM 2006, LNCS 4269, pp. 86 – 97, 2006. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006 An Ontology-Based Approach to the Description and Execution of Composite Network Management Processes for Network Monitoring José María Fuentes, Jorge E. López de Vergara, and Pablo Castells Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Campus de Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain {Chema.Fuentes, Jorge.Lopez_Vergara, Pablo.Castells}@uam.es Abstract. Web service technology has been proposed to implement manage- ment interfaces of managed resources. These web services can usually be com- bined to perform composite processes. These composite processes can be defined with service ontologies such as OWL-S, which allows their formal de- scription. However, other technologies, including the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), provide more mature execution en- gines. This paper presents an approach to define and execute composite net- work management processes with existing technology. For this, a use case is developed in which a set of web service interfaces are defined for a network probe, and a composite process is specified using OWL-S to monitor the net- work load. Then, this specification is later translated to WSBPEL and inter- preted by a real execution engine. Keywords: OWL-S, WSBPEL, Composite Process, Network Management, Network Monitoring. 1 Introduction Integrated management frameworks have traditionally provided a way to use homo- geneous procedures to access managed resources. However, the evolution of the networks and the services deployed on them have implied the necessity of new man- agement mechanisms [1]. Currently, new technologies compete in the network management arena, where web services and ontologies can be used respectively for the exchange of management information and the definition of management informa- tion itself. Web services provide a maximum decoupling among components and abstraction of the inner complexities with well defined interfaces. Ontologies provide a way to formally describe the management information, avoiding misinterpretations. Web service composition is another technology with application in network man- agement. A set of web services can be called in a sequence to accomplish the tasks of a management application. The composition of web services can be defined formally by using service ontologies such as OWL-S that describe by a set of processes how and when to invoke these web services. However, current semantic web service tools are not mature enough to interpret such process descriptions. Then, in the meantime,