Linked USDL Agreement: Effectively Sharing Semantic Service Level Agreements on the Web

Abstract

As the use of services available on the Web is becoming mainstream, contracts and legal aspects of the relationship between providers and consumers need to be formalized. However, current proposals to model service level agreements are mostly focused on technical aspects, do not explicitly provide semantics to agreement terms, and do not follow Web principles. These limitations prevent take-up, automatic processing, and effective sharing of agreements. Linked USDL Agreement is a Linked Data based semantic model to describe and share service agreements that extends Linked USDL, which offers a family of languages to describe various technical and business aspects of services. We followed a use case driven approach, evaluating the applicability of our proposal in a cloud computing scenario, and comparing its expressiveness with existing models. Finally, we show a concrete tool that helps to model and check the validity of agreements.