Enhancing Client Intentions Analysis for Service Level Agreements Establishment Assistance

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a mean to guarantee quality of service terms between providers and consumers. Obviously, it is very important to ensure a clear and fair establishment of these SLAs. This issue has not been well addressed, especially when providers and clients do not share the same knowledge degree. In many cases, clients have to select a subset of predefined technical choices by the providers. However, non expert clients may not understand these choices. To address this problem, we started by modeling client intentions and provider offers using ontologies. This helped us to develop an automatic matching approach between these models in order to bridge the gap between the client and the provider knowledge. Our matching approach is composed of three steps. The first step consists in generating correspondences between the client and the provider terms by assigning certainties for their equivalence. The second step corrects and refines these certainties. In the third step, we evaluate the matching results using inference rules to facilitate the automatic generation of a Service Level Agreement draft.