A formal approach for the inference plane supporting integrated management tasks in the Future Internet

Integrated management of the Future Internet governs resources, networks, systems and services. This requires systems supporting services to orchestrate decision-making and management tasks. Management tasks must be performed considering end-user and network activity, and be able to enforce and verify operations for network and end-user requirements control. This paper proposes the semantic enrichment of management information described in information and data models with ontological data and provides an approach to formalize the Inference Plane promoting integrated management. The proposed semantic enrichment provides new semantic tools to integrate context information with management service operations, and offers a more complete understanding and hence, a more inclusive governance of the management of resources, devices, networks, systems and services. The semantic approach consists of the ontology for support and management, which provide the necessary semantic richness to represent the different types of information needed to be integrated in management operations. In particular, it can be used with other tools for governing and orchestrating behavior.