Research Of Unified Network Management Information Model Based On Ontology

The problem of integrating network management has been aroused by increase of network types and the integration of different services. Network managers expect to realize management using a unified GUI, a network management system and operations. The most important issue of integrating network management is the consistency of information models, while the main problem of the information model is to define a standard, unified and extensive management information structure and an expressive definition language.Once the information model is set up, we should translate the current model to a unified one. Until now, some standards of translations among different information models have been defined. But these translations are done only at the level of syntax, neglecting implicit semantics. With the increment of managed objects, the data flows in the network also increase, which leads to the inefficiency of information processing. So, the request of the semantic information in network management is of great importance. If the knowledge base and the semantic reasoning function can be added to managed objects, the needed information will be delivered to network management system accurately.As a conceptual modeling tool on describing information systems at the semantic and knowledge level, ontology have received many attentions by researchers when it first appeared. It has been widely used in many fields of computer science such as knowledge management and artificial intelligence with the purpose of sharing and reusing knowledge and enhancing capabilities of expressing semantics. Adding ontology to the unified information model can solve the semantic problems existed in current translations.After an in-depth studies and discussions of current information models and the unified information model, the mapping rules between these models and the information merging method are given. In order to reach a semantic interoperability of different management models, a unified information model based on ontology is proposed, and the building process of the management information ontology is discussed. The information of semantic behavior is added into the ontology and the unified information model isestablished through deduction by the ontology reasoning system which can obtain the implicit relations. On the basis of this model, managers can define rules themselves and perform relative operations automatically. At last, the comparison of current definition language and ontology language is given and the reasoning process of the ontology reasoning system is discussed.