John M. Willis has pointed me to a new research paper by Lamia Youseff (University of California, Santa Barbara) Maria Butrico, Dilma Da Silva (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), have created titled “Toward a Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing.”

The paper lays out a proposed Cloud Computing Ontology: depicted as five layers (Cloud Application Layer, Cloud Software Environment Layer, Cloud Software Infrastructure Layer, Software Kernel, Hardware and Firmware), with three constituents to the cloud infrastructure layer (Computational Resources, Data Storage, Communication). The layered approach represents the inter-dependency and composability between the different layers in the cloud.

The paper proposes "an ontology of this area which demonstrates a dissection of the cloud into five main layers, and illustrates their interrelations as well as their inter-dependency on preceding technologies. Better comprehension of the technology would enable the community to design more efficient portals and gateways for the cloud, and facilitate the adoption of this novel computing approach to computing."

The paper goes on to describe "The current state of the art in cloud computing research lacks the understanding of the classification of the cloud systems, their correlation and inter-dependency. In turn, this obscurity is hindering the advancement of this research field. As a result, the introduction of an organization of the cloud computing knowledge domain, its components and their relations – i.e. an ontology – is necessary to help the research community achieve a better understanding of this novel technology.

Interesting read.
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~lyouseff/CCOntology/CloudOntology.pdf

• A Tactical Cloud Computing Ontology