A High-Level Ontology Network for ICT Infrastructures

Abstract

The ICT infrastructures of medium and large organisations that offer ICT services (infrastructure, platforms, software, applications, etc.) are becoming increasingly complex. Nowadays, these environments combine all sorts of hardware (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, storage elements, network equipment) and software (e.g., virtual machines, servers, microservices, services, products, AI models). Tracking, understanding and acting upon all the data produced in the context of such environments is hence challenging. Configuration management databases have been so far widely used to store and provide access to relevant information and views on these components and on their relationships. However, different databases are organised according to different schemas. Despite existing efforts in standardising the main entities relevant for configuration management, there is not yet a core set of ontologies that describes these environments homogeneously, and which can be easily extended when new types of items appear. This paper presents an ontology network created with the purpose of serving as an initial step towards an homogeneous representation of this domain, and which has been already used to produce a knowledge graph for a large ICT company.