A semantic-based federated cloud system for emergency response

Cloud federation can be described through the concept of collaboration, where each organization has its own cloud(s) that deals with a different and independent domain but needs to work together with other organizations in order to fulfill a specific shared objective. According to this perspective, the federation is a collection of interacting clouds that collaborate with one another through the instantiation and management of shared subsets of resources (computation and storage resources as well as sensors and actuators). This idea could be profitably used in those scenarios in which different organizations have to share several resources (e.g., emergency response or disaster management scenario). On the other hand, when different independent organizations share their resources, several issues arise. One of them is related to interoperability problems. As a consequence, this work also introduces a framework for an ontology-based resource life cycle management and provisioning in a federated cloud infrastructure. Therefore, The main contributions of this work consists of redesigning a cloud infrastructure architecture from the ground up, leveraging Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service Technologies, and natively supporting a federated provisioning of any kind of resource. This paper exploits, as a motivating scenario, a flood emergency response system.