L. Lopes et al. (Eds.): Euro-Par 2014 Workshops, Part II, LNCS 8806, pp. 1–12, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 On the Role of Ontologies in the Design of Service Based Cloud Applications Fotis Gonidis¹, Iraklis Paraskakis¹, and Anthony J.H. Simons² ¹ South-East European Research Centre (SEERC), City College – International Faculty of the University of Sheffield, 24 Proxenou Koromila Street, 54622 Thessaloniki, Greece {fgonidis,iparaskakis}@seerc.org ² Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, United Kingdom A.Simons@dcs.shef.ac.uk Abstract. The wide exploitation of cloud resources has been hindered by the diversity on the provision of these resources and thus resulting in heterogeneity between them. Research efforts on the design of cloud applications, leveraging resources form heterogeneous cloud environments, have been concentrated on traditional cloud platform resources such as deployment capabilities and data stores. However, the emergence of the cloud application platforms has made available a wide range of platform basic services (e.g. e-mail, message queue and authentication service) that can drastically decrease the application development time. Our work focuses on eliminating the heterogeneity among the providers offering those services. To this end we propose an ontology- driven framework, which facilitates the seamless and transparent use of platform basic services provisioned by multiple clouds environments. Ontologies are leveraged to enable the homogeneous description of the functionality of the service providers. Keywords: Multi-Cloud, Ontologies, Cloud platform service description. 1 Introduction Cloud application platforms [1] are becoming increasingly popular and have the potential to change the way applications are developed, involving compositions of platform basic services. A platform basic service, in the Platform as a Service level (PaaS), can be considered as a piece of software which offers certain functionality and is reusable. Examples of such services are authentication mechanisms, logging mechanisms, message queues and email service. Such services are considered to be interwoven in the creation of many applications running from a cloud application platform and thus using the service instead of creating the corresponding code is of great benefit to the application developer. A service can be offered natively by the platform, such as the e-mail service offered by Google App Engine [2] and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk [3]. Alternatively, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can offer added-value services for a given platform, such as Heroku [4].