Abstract:
The computing continuum, including cloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offers unprecedented opportunities for scalable, energy efficient, and real-time data processing. However, interoperability is still a major issue in bridging intentions of people and the actual resources, due to their dynamic, distributed and heterogeneous nature. As a consequence, managing operations across the computing continuum remains challenging.
This paper introduces a new ontology for ensuring interoperability in computing continuum intent-based data operations. Our ontology is developed as part of the INTENT research project and provides a standardized, machine-readable framework to express high-level intents that may include multiple goals and requests, such as data storage, processing, or transfer, while abstracting the underlying infrastructure and technologies.
The main purpose of the INTENT ontology is to make easier for humans to deploy applications on highly heterogeneous environments by connecting different domains: users understood as natural persons, intents initially expressed in natural language, business and user resources, applications that can be deployed, and the workflow aimed at managing and organizing these domains. It explicitly models key components of the intent lifecycle, including intent managers and intent reports, supporting transparency, traceability, and interoperability. The INTENT ontology is built upon the TeleManagement (TM) Forum ontology for structuring and managing intents, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) PROV Ontology (PROV-O), the Friend of a Friend (FOAF), and the Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontologies for handling users, resources and applications.
The novelty of the INTENT ontology lies in enabling intent-based interactions through structured representation of user high-level goals, such as the deployment of applications in the computing continuum with latency constraints, while providing mechanisms for translating them into executable actions and tracking intent satisfaction over time.
