A Formal Service Contract Model for Accountable SaaS and Cloud Services

  • Authors:
  • Joe Zou;Yan Wang;Kwei-Jay Lin

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SCC '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Enabled by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), recently Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud computing are gaining momentum in the industry. An open issue is how to ensure accountability in business services offered through Internet. Traditionally a contract is an effective legal means to uphold accountability in business transactions. In this paper, we propose a novel service contract model called OWL-SC for e-Services. Based on OWL-DL and SWRL, OWL-SC model can be used to disclose obligations of both e-Services consumer and e-Services provider. More importantly, the model allows service participants to monitor the service contract execution and keep track of obligation fulfillment for each party during service delivery. We also propose a graphical model SC-CPN based on Colored Petri-Nets (CPN) to formally model contract obligations and their interdependencies. SC-CPN can also be used to validate the correctness of obligations in OWL-SC through simulation and state space analysis. Finally, we use the Congo Book service as an example to illustrate how to use OWL-SC and SC-CPN to build a service contract model.