Towards a Reference Architecture for Semantic Interoperability in Multi-Cloud Platforms

This paper focuses on semantic interoperability as one of the most significant issues in multi-cloud platforms. Organizations and individuals that adopt the multi-cloud strategy often use various cloud services and platforms. On top of that, cloud service providers may offer a range of services with unique data formats, structures, and semantics. Hence, semantic interoperability is required to enable applications and services to understand and use data consistently, regardless of the cloud service providers. The main goal of this study is to propose a reference architecture for semantic interoperability in multi-cloud platforms. Towards achieving the main goal, this paper presents two main contributions. First contribution is an extended cloud computing interoperability taxonomy, with semantic approach as one of the solutions for facilitating semantic cloud interoperability. Two fundamental semantic approaches have been identified, namely semantic technologies and frameworks which will be adopted as the main building blocks. Semantic technologies, such as ontologies, can be used to represent the semantics or meanings of data. Data may be reliably represented across multiple cloud platforms by employing a common ontology. This promotes semantic interoperability by ensuring that data is interpreted and processed uniformly within diverse cloud platforms. On the other hand, a framework offers a standardized and organized way for managing, exchanging, and representing data and services. For the second contribution of this paper, a review of recent (2018-2023) related works has been conducted by investigating the state-of-the-art of semantic interoperability in multi-cloud platforms. As a result, the proposed solution will be implemented in the context of a reference architecture. The reference architecture will act as a blueprint to systematically represent semantic interoperability in multi-cloud platforms using a hybrid approach of role-based and layer-based. Additionally, a semantic layer will be extended to the reference architecture to facilitate semantic interoperability.