MOQ: Web Services Ontologies for QOS and General Quality Evaluations

When describing Web services, one of the obvious aspects that needs representing is Quality of Service” (QoS), the capability of a Web service to meet an acceptable level of service as per factors such as availability and accessibility. However too much of a focus on developing functional QoS ontologies has led to an over-emphasis on representing solely QoS metrics and units of measurement. For instance, what does round trip time actually mean? Is the round trip time of every data item measured? Is it an average, or is every nth item measured? Is it the actual time that is important or just the % of items that are beyond a certain range? Arguably existing QoS ontologies cannot readily answer many of these design questions because these questions have less to do with evaluating QoS and more to do with representing “what is quality?” Therefore, there is an unmet need for Web services ontologies that are designed at a higher level encompassing domain independent concepts, and generally applicable beyond QoS evaluations. The MOQ set of ontologies designed from the premise that quality is “conformance to requirements” aims to fill this need. Comprised of ontologies of requirement, measurement, traceability, and quality management systems, MOQ can be extended to encompass QoS metrics and measurement units or be designed to interoperate with existing QoS ontology. Either way MOQ use promises to ensure that ambiguity in QoS evaluations is minimized