towards a semantic information system for it services

International Symposium on Decision Support Systems • Cairo • December 2015 1

Vera G. Meister, Jonas Jetschni

Towards a Semantic Information System

for IT Services

IEEE Seventh International Conference on

Intelligent Computing and Information Systems,


Initial Situation and Requirements

Ontology Engineering

IT Service Catalog Ontology

Prototypical Application Development

Further Work

Agenda

Meister, Jetschni: Towards a Semantic Information System for IT Services 2015-12-12

WebDevelopment

SemanticWeb

Technologies

IT Service Catalog


• in our university

home-grown

heterogeneous

primarily focused on technical aspects

rather reactive than proactive

• similar situation in a majority of public organizations

• lack of transparency and guidance for

users

IT staff

executives

Initial Situation



IT Management Structure


NOG

Administration

CIO Panel

Lab Services

DTE

Lab Services

DCS

Lab Services

DBM

Head Head

Library

Data Center

ChancellorPresident

CIMC

Center X

Project Y


Use Cases and Requirements


want to have guidance on public IT services at university

e. g. as prospect students, as potential project partners of the

university etc.

need information about a specific IT service

e. g. about access conditions, service options, support offerings,

operational processes etc.

aim on central coordination and standardization of services

e. g. for efficient appointment of scarce resources, for optimal

support for IT management processes etc.

need reliable data about costs and expenses of IT services

e. g. for budget planning, for implementing an internal transfer

pricing system for shared IT services etc.


Development Process



PrototypingEvaluation




Reuse of standard concepts, relations and attributes

Design Principle

rdfEditor, Protégé, WebProtégé

Tools

Domain knowledge and competency questions

Knowledge


Who acts in a service? Is that a person, an organization, or a role?

Are there relations between those actors?

In which relation (user, provider, customer, or supporter) does someone

act in a service?

Which entities (IT assets, documents) are associated with a service?

Are there relations between one service and others?

How can a service be evaluated in terms of priority and criticality?

Competency Questions



IT Service Catalog (itcat) Ontology


Agent

Service

schema:agent

Document

Organi-

zation

Person

Role

Service Category

Catalog Category

Subject Category

Life Cycle Stage

itcat:inCategory

IT Asset

Priority

Entity

Criticality

Qualitative

Value

itcat:hasStage

itcat:usableWith foaf:page

itcat:hasPriority

itcat:hasCriticality

schema:member

schema:employee

• Planning• Implementation• Operation• In Relief• Off

• Communication• Business Adm.• Information• Infrastructure• Library• Network• Teaching Platf.• Miscellaneous

• Business• Infrastructure• Operational• Public

schema:isRelatedTo


Phases in Application Development


Proof of concept

Phase 1

Functional prototype

Phase 2

Advanced software design

Phase 3


System Design of the Prototype


Business LogicPHP

Web InterfaceHTML5 · CSS3 · JS

REST

Triple StoreApache Jena Fuseki Server

SPARQL 1.1 Endpoint

Sto

rage

Tie

rApplic

ation

Tie

rPre

senta

tion T

ier


Future System Design


RDF/TurtleJSON-LD

Web ApplicationHTML5 · CSS3 · JS

REST APIPHP

REST Client

Triple Store

SPARQL 1.1 Endpoint

JSON

REST Client

App

REST Client

App

Document DatabaseTemplates · Documents

Connector

Sto

rage T

ier

Applic

ation T

ier

Pre

senta

tion T

ier

REST

Semantic ServerReasoning · Search · Parsing

...


Development of SPARQL Queries


As easy as possible.

Rule 1

As comprehensive

as possible.

Rule 2

As general as possible.

Rule 3

Specify the target graph pattern and

translate it into SPARQL. 2

Define the question in natural language.1

Add filters, constraints, or aggregations.3

Specify filters for language(s)

and/or data types.4

Check, evaluate, and modify the results. 5


IT Service Catalog



Appreciated by Evaluators


Chancellor

Professor

Head of Lab

Services

Controller

Student

Reports allow better control of the organization, e. g. in terms of review of contracts with extern providers.

The tool may be very helpful during on boarding.

We could implement a ticket system for all users.

We could check the involvement of staff into IT services and allocate costs according to the cost-by-cause principle.

It‘s convenient to have all services for students in one place.


Further Work


Functional

enhancements

Information system as single-point of truth

Deployment in the federal state of Brandenburg

Advanced

software design

Ontology

upgrading

Login and target-group-specifics

Visualisation of relations

Faceted search and filtering

Connection to other systems

e.g. monitoring, CMS, and DMS

Substantial enhancement of IT management in the public sector

1

2

3


Thank you for your attention

Vera G. Meister, Jonas Jetschni

towards a semantic information system for it services

Technology