Semantic management of distributed Web applications

Specifying issues such as transactions, session management, and user rights in an application-independent way facilitates managing application servers and Web services. Developers achieve this by configuring generic software with the help of administration tools and corresponding XML configuration files. This lets you flexibly develop and administrate a distributed application; however, because configuration files lack a coherent formal model, they don´t provide a high level of abstraction to facilitate management, even if they´re more or less human-readable XML. So, it´s difficult or often impossible to query a system for conclusions that come from integrating several descriptions. We remedy the problem by applying semantic technology - that is, ontologies and inference engines - in the middleware solutions. We contribute a state-of-the-art management ontology and propose a design to integrate the ontology infrastructure in existing application servers. We implemented a prototype of our proposed scheme in KAON SERVER, an amalgamation of JBoss and the KAON ontology tool suite.