Advanced medical devices increasingly rely on AI-driven frameworks to automate compliance processes, ensuring safety and efficacy while reducing regulatory burdens. In the United States, software-based medical devices, including those utilizing AI/ML models, are regulated by the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) under the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 21. These regulations are extensive, cross-referenced documents that require significant human effort to parse, leading to high compliance costs for manufacturers. We propose a novel, semantically rich framework that extracts regulatory knowledge from FDA documents and translates it into a machine-processable format. Our system encodes regulatory knowledge into an OWL/RDF-based knowledge graph and uses the Mistral 7B Instruct model to dynamically generate SPARQL queries, perform compliance reasoning, and produce structured reports. This enables automated device classification (Class I, II, or III) and real-time regulatory evaluation. Validated through real-world use cases, our framework significantly reduces manual review effort, enhances interpretability, and accelerates time-to-market. The proposed approach integrates AI reasoning and semantic technologies to achieve scalable, transparent, and automated regulatory compliance.

Healthcare providers are deploying a large number of AI-driven Medical devices to help monitor and medicate patients. For patients with chronic ailments, like diabetes or gastric diseases, usage of these devices becomes part of their daily lifestyle. These medical devices often capture personally identifiable information (PII) and hence are strictly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure the safety and efficacy of the medical device. Medical device regulations are currently available as large textual documents, called Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 21, that cross-reference other documents and so require substantial human effort and cost to parse and comprehend. We have developed a semantically rich framework MedReg-KG to extract the knowledge from the rules and policies for Medical devices and translate it into a machine-processable format that can be reasoned over. By applying Deontic Logic over the policies, we are able to identify the permissions and prohibitions in the regulation policies. This framework was developed using AI/Knowledge extraction techniques and Semantic Web technologies like OWL/RDF and SPARQL. This paper presents our Ontology/Knowledge graph and the Deontic rules integrated into the design. We include the results of our validation against the dataset of Gastroenterology Urology devices and demonstrate the efficiency gained by using our system.

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an exponential increase in data generation, especially from wearable IoT devices. While this data influx offers unparalleled insights and connectivity, it also brings significant privacy and security challenges. Existing regulatory frameworks like the United States (US) National Institute of Standards and Technology Interagency or Internal Report (NISTIR) 8228, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aim to address these challenges but often operate in isolation, making their compliance in the vast IoT ecosystem inconsistent. This paper presents the IoT-Reg ontology, a holistic semantic framework that amalgamates these regulations, offering a stratified approach based on the IoT data lifecycle stages and providing a comprehensive yet granular approach to IoT data handling practices. The IoT-Reg ontology aims to transform the IoT domain into a realm where regulatory controls are seamlessly integrated system components by emphasizing risk management, compliance, and the pivotal role of manufacturers’ privacy policies, ensuring consistent adherence, enhancing user trust, and promoting a privacy-centric IoT environment. We include the results of validating this framework against risk mitigation for Wearable IoT devices.

A large volume of cybersecurity-related data sets are generated daily from systems following disparate protocols and standards. It is humanly impossible for cybersecurity experts to manually sieve through these large data sets, with different schema and metadata, to determine potential attacks or issues. A myriad of applications and tool sets are offered to automate the analysis of large cyber data sets. Semantic Web's community has been studying the field of cybersecurity for over a decade and produced numerous knowledge graphs and frameworks. The Unified Cybersecurity Ontology (UCO) connected many of the leading knowledge representation frameworks, providing a holistic mapping of cyber data, beginning in 2016. MITRE ATT&CK is used by a wide variety of practitioners to understand how their current data and tooling prepare them to defend against both Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and less formal threat actors. The UCO and MITRE ATT&CK have provided researchers and practitioners, respectively, with tools to standardize data collection, correlation, and analysis. However, it is not apparent how current knowledge graphs and their applications in the cybersecurity domain utilize ATT&CK. In this paper, we present the results of our study on whether current cybersecurity knowledge graphs have mapped the main MITRE ATT&CK matrices.

Consumers evaluate and choose cloud-based services based on the Service Level Agreements (SLA). These agreements list the service terms and metrics to be agreed upon by the service providers and the customers. Current cloud SLAs are text documents that require significant manual effort to parse and determine if providers meet the SLAs. Moreover, due to the lack of standardization, providers differ in the way they define the terms and metrics, making it more difficult to compare different provider SLAs. We have developed a novel framework to significantly automate the process of extracting knowledge embedded in cloud SLAs and representing it in a semantically rich knowledge graph helping the user to make a calculated decision in choosing a provider. Our framework captures the key terms, measures, and deontic rules, in the form of obligations and permissions present in the cloud SLAs. In this paper, we discuss our framework, technique, and challenges in automating the cloud services agreement. We also describe our results and their validation against well-established standards.

With the rapid enhancements in technology and the adoption of web services, there has been a significant increase in cyber threats faced by organizations in cyberspace. It has become essential to get financial cover to mitigate the expenses due to a security incident. Organizations want to purchase adequate cyber insurance to safeguard against the third-party services they use. However, cyber insurance policies describe their coverages and exclusions using legal jargon that can be difficult to comprehend. Parsing these policy documents and extracting the rules embedded in them is currently a very manual time-consuming process. We have developed a novel framework that automatically extracts the coverage and exclusion key terms and rules embedded in a cyber policy. We have built our framework using Information Retrieval and Artificial Intelligence techniques, specifically Semantic Web and Modal Logic. We have also developed a web interface where users can find the best matching cyber insurance policy based on particular coverage criteria. To validate our approach, we used industry standards proposed by the Federal Trade Commission document (FTC) and have applied it against publicly available policies of seven insurance providers. Our system will allow cyber insurance seekers to explore various policy documents and compare the paradigms mentioned in those documents while selecting the best relevant policy documents.

Contact tracing is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person (“case”) and collecting information about these contacts. Contact tracing is an essential part of public health infrastructure and slows down the spread of infectious diseases. Existing contact tracing methods are extremely time and labor intensive due to their reliance on manually interviewing cases, contacts, and locations visited by cases. Additionally, complex privacy regulations mean that contact tracers must be extensively trained to avoid improper data sharing. App-based contact tracing, a proposed solution to these problems, has not been widely adopted by the general public due to privacy and security concerns. We develop a secure, semantically rich framework for automating the contact tracing process. This framework includes a novel, flexible ontology for contact tracing and is based on a semi-federated data-as-a-service architecture that automates contact tracing operations. Our framework supports security and privacy through situation-aware access control, where distributed query rewriting and semantic reasoning are used to automatically add situation based constraints to protect data. In this paper, we present our framework along with the validation of our system via common use cases extracted from CDC guidelines on COVID-19 contact tracing.

COVID pandemic management via contact tracing and vaccine distribution has resulted in a large volume and high velocity of Health-related data being collected and exchanged among various healthcare providers, regulatory and government agencies, and people. This unprecedented sharing of sensitive health-related Big Data has raised technical challenges of ensuring robust data exchange while adhering to security and privacy regulations. We have developed a semantically rich and trusted Compliance Enforcement Framework for sharing large velocity Health datasets. This framework, built using Semantic Web technologies, defines a Trust Score for each participant in the data exchange process and includes ontologies combined with policy reasoners that ensure data access complies with health regulations, like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We have validated our framework by applying it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Contact Tracing Use case by exchanging over 1 million synthetic contact tracing records. This paper presents our framework in detail, along with the validation results against Contact Tracing data exchange. This framework can be used by all entities who need to exchange high velocity-sensitive data while ensuring real-time compliance with data regulations.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients’ end. This creates significant overhead for the patient, who must authorize every access of their health record. It is also not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients end. This creates a significant overhead for the patient who must authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need to develop a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy to use cloud-based EHR Service management. We present a novel, centralized, attribute-based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHRs access authority to medical providers.

Cloud Legal documents, like Privacy Policies and Terms of Services (ToS), include key terms and rules that enable consumers to continuously monitor the performance of the cloud services used in their organization. To ensure high consumer confidence in the cloud service, it is necessary that these documents are clear and comprehensible to the average consumer. However, in practice, service providers often use legalese and ambiguous language in cloud legal documents resulting in consumers consenting or rejecting the terms without understanding the details. A measure capturing ambiguity in the texts of cloud service documents will enable consumers to decide if they understand what they are agreeing to, and deciding whether that service will meet their organizational requirements. It will also allow them to compare the service policies across various vendors. We have developed a novel model, ViCLOUD, that defines a scoring method based on linguistic cues to measure ambiguity in cloud legal documents and compare them to other peer websites. In this paper, we describe the ViCLOUD model in detail along with the validation results when applying it to 112 privacy policies and 108 Terms of Service documents of 115 cloud service vendors. The score distribution gives us a landscape of current trends in cloud services and a scale of comparison for new documentation. Our model will be very useful to organizations in making judicious decisions when selecting their cloud service.

Data protection authorities formulate policies and rules which the service providers have to comply with to ensure security and privacy when they perform Big Data analytics using users Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The knowledge contained in the data regulations and organizational privacy policies are typically maintained as short unstructured text in HTML or PDF formats. Hence it is an open challenge to determine the specific regulation rules that are being addressed by a provider's privacy policies. We have developed a semantically rich framework, using techniques from Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing, to extract and compare the context of a short text in real-time. This framework allows automated incremental text comparison and identifying context from short text policy documents by determining the semantic similarity score and extracting semantically similar key terms. Additionally, we also created a knowledge graph to store the semantically similar comparison results while evaluating our framework across EU GDPR and privacy policies of 20 organizations complying with this regulation associated with various categories apply to Big Data stored in the cloud. Our approach can be utilized by Big Data practitioners to update their referential documents regularly based on the authority documents.

Cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) systems provide important security controls by encrypting patient data. However, these records cannot be queried without decrypting the entire record. This incurs a huge amount of burden in network bandwidth and the client-side computation. As the volume of cloud-based EHRs reaches Big Data levels, it is essential to search over these encrypted patient records without decrypting them to ensure that the medical caregivers can efficiently access the EHRs. This is especially critical if the caregivers have access to only certain sections of the patient EHR and should not decrypt the whole record. In this paper, we present our novel approach that facilitates searchable encryption of large EHR systems using Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and multi-keyword search techniques. Our framework outsources key search features to the cloud side. This way, our system can perform keyword searches on encrypted data with significantly reduced costs of network bandwidth and client-side computation.

While adopting Blockchain technologies to automate their enterprise functionality, organizations are recognizing the challenges of scalability and manual configuration that the state of art present. Scalability of Hyperledger Fabric is an open challenge recognized by the research community. We have automated many of the configuration steps of installing Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain on AWS infrastructure and have benchmarked the scalability of that system. We have used the UCR (University of California Riverside) Time Series Archive with 128 timeseries datasets containing over 191,177 rows of data totaling 76,453,742 numbers. Using an automated Serverless approach, we have loaded this dataset, by chunks, into different AWS instances, triggering the load by SQS messaging. In this paper, we present the results of this benchmarking study and describe the approach we took to automate the Hyperledger Fabric processes using serverless Lambda functions and SQS triggering. We will also discuss what is needed to make the Blockchain technology more robust and scalable.

With the rapid adoption of web services, the need to protect against various threats has become imperative for organizations operating in cyberspace. Organizations are increasingly opting to get financial cover in the event of losses due to a security incident. This helps them safeguard against the threat posed to third-party services that the organization uses. It is in the organization's interest to understand the insurance requirements and procure all necessary direct and liability coverages. This helps transfer some risks to the insurance providers. However, cyber insurance policies often list details about coverages and exclusions using legalese that can be difficult to comprehend. Currently, it takes a significant manual effort to parse and extract knowledgeable rules from these lengthy and complicated policy documents. We have developed a semantically rich machine processable framework to automatically analyze cyber insurance policy and populate a knowledge graph that efficiently captures various inclusion and exclusion terms and rules embedded in the policy. In this paper, we describe this framework that has been built using technologies from AI, including Semantic Web, Modal/ Deontic Logic, and Natural Language Processing. We have validated our approach using industry standards proposed by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and applying it against publicly available policies of 7 cyber insurance vendors. Our system will enable cyber insurance seekers to automatically analyze various policy documents and make a well-informed decision by identifying its inclusions and exclusions.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based electronic medical records services, due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient centric approach for EHR management where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients' end. This however creates a significant overhead for the patient who has to authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given the multiple personnel involved in providing care and that at times the patient may not be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need of developing a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy cloud-based EHR management. We have developed a novel, centralized, attribute based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHR's access authority to the medical providers. In this paper, we describe this novel ABE approach as well as the prototype system that we have created to illustrate it.

Big data analytics related to consumer behavior, market analysis, opinions, and recommendation often deal with end user's derived and inferred data, along with the observed data. To ensure consumer data protection, rules defined by the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) must be adhered to by every organization using Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data for Big Data analysis. Similarly, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has policy guidelines specifically for organizations handling consumer's payment card data. Both data regulation policies are currently available only in textual format and require significant manual effort to ensure their compliance. We have developed an integrated, semantically rich Knowledge Graph (or Ontology) to represent the rules mandated by both PCI DSS and EU GDPR. In the Ontology, we have also identified the obligations defined in these regulations and related them with corresponding Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) controls. We have validated this Knowledge Graph against the data policies of major vendors that deal with Big Data. This Knowledge Graph that is available in the public domain can be used by Big Data practitioners to automate data protection compliance in their organization.

The multilingual nature of the Internet increases complications in the cybersecurity community's ongoing efforts to strategically mine threat intelligence from OSINT data on the web. OSINT sources such as social media, blogs, and dark web vulnerability markets exist in diverse languages and hinder security analysts, who are unable to draw conclusions from intelligence in languages they don't understand. Although third party translation engines are growing stronger, they are unsuited for private security environments. First, sensitive intelligence is not a permitted input to third party engines due to privacy and confidentiality policies. In addition, third party engines produce generalized translations that tend to lack exclusive cybersecurity terminology. In this paper, we address these issues and describe our system that enables threat intelligence understanding across unfamiliar languages. We create a neural network based system that takes in cybersecurity data in a different language and outputs the respective English translation. The English translation can then be understood by an analyst, and can also serve as input to an AI based cyber-defense system that can take mitigative action. As a proof of concept, we have created a pipeline which takes Russian threats and generates its corresponding English, RDF, and vectorized representations. Our network optimizes translations on specifically, cybersecurity data.

To effectively identify and filter out attacks from known sources like botnets, spammers, virus infected systems etc., organizations increasingly procure services that determine the reputation of IP addresses. Adoption of encryption techniques like TLS 1.2 and 1.3 aggravate this cause, owing to the higher cost of decryption needed for examining traffic contents. Currently, most IP reputation services provide blacklists by analyzing malware and spam records. However, newer but similar IP addresses used by the same attackers need not be present in such lists and attacks from them will get bypassed. In this paper, we present Dynamic Attribute based Reputation (DAbR), a euclidean distance based technique, to generate reputation scores for IP addresses by assimilating meta-data from known bad IP addresses. This approach is based on our observation that many bad IP's share similar attributes and the requirement for a lightweight technique for reputation scoring. DAbR generates reputation scores for IP addresses on a 0-10 scale which represents its trustworthiness based on known bad IP address attributes. The reputation scores when used in conjunction with a policy enforcement module, can provide high performance and non privacy-invasive malicious traffic filtering. To evaluate DAbR, we calculated reputation scores on a dataset of 87k IP addresses and used them to classify IP addresses as good/bad based on a threshold. An F-1 score of 78% in this classification task demonstrates our technique's performance.

The rollout of European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) will have a far-reaching effect on Cloud data privacy and compliance for both the Cloud Service Providers (Data Providers) and the Consumers (Data Consumers). GDPR mandates that organizations collecting and processing information related to EU citizens adhere to its articles irrespective of where they are located or where the data is stored. This regulation is currently available only in the textual format and so requires significant manual effort to ensure its compliance. We have developed a semantically rich Ontology (or knowledge graph) to represent the rules and regulations mandated for both the cloud data consumers and providers by EU GDPR. In the Ontology, we have identified the different roles and their corresponding obligations under the GDPR articles. This knowledge graph, that is available in public domain, is machine processable and will help in automating EU GDPR regulation compliance.

One of the key challenges faced by consumers is to efficiently manage and monitor the quality of cloud services. To manage service performance, consumers have to validate rules embedded in cloud legal contracts, such as Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Privacy Policies, that are available as text documents. Currently this analysis requires significant time and manual labor and is thus inefficient. We propose a cognitive assistant that can be used to manage cloud legal documents by automatically extracting knowledge (terms, rules, constraints) from them and reasoning over it to validate service performance. In this paper, we present this Question and Answering (Q&A) system that can be used to analyze and obtain information from the SLA documents. We have created a knowledgebase of Cloud SLAs from various providers which forms the underlying repository of our Q&A system. We utilized techniques from natural language processing and semantic web (RDF, SPARQL and Fuseki server) to build our framework. We also present sample queries on how a consumer can compute metrics such as service credit.

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a user's PII is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our data privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access-control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by big data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.

With increasing regulation of Big Data, it is becoming essential for organizations to ensure compliance with various data protection standards. The Federal Acquisition Regulations System (FARS) within the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) includes facts and rules for individuals and organizations seeking to do business with the US Federal government. Parsing and gathering knowledge from such lengthy regulation documents is currently done manually and is time and human intensive. Hence, developing a cognitive assistant for automated analysis of such legal documents has become a necessity. We have developed semantically rich approach to automate the analysis of legal documents and have implemented a system to capture various facts and rules contributing towards building an efficient legal knowledge base that contains details of the relationships between various legal elements, semantically similar terminologies, deontic expressions and cross-referenced legal facts and rules. In this paper, we describe our framework along with the results of automating knowledge extraction from the FARS document (Title 48, CFR). Our approach can be used by Big Data Users to automate knowledge extraction from Large Legal documents.

With the increase in the number of cloud services and service providers, manual analysis of Service Level Agreements (SLA), comparison between different service offerings and conformance regulation has become a difficult task for customers. Cloud SLAs are policy documents describing the legal agreement between cloud providers and customers. SLA specifies the commitment of availability, performance of services, penalties associated with violations and procedure for customers to receive compensations in case of service disruptions. The aim of our research is to develop technology solutions for automated cloud service management using Semantic Web and Text Mining techniques. In this paper we discuss in detail the challenges in automating cloud services management and present our preliminary work in extraction of knowledge from SLAs of different cloud services. We extracted two types of information from the SLA documents which can be useful for end users. First, the relationship between the service commitment and financial credit. We represented this information by enhancing the existing Cloud service ontology proposed by us in our previous research. Second, we extracted rules in the form of obligations and permissions from SLAs using modal and deontic logic formalizations. For our analysis, we considered six publicly available SLA documents from different cloud computing service providers.

Consumers want to ensure that their enterprise data is stored securely and obliviously on the cloud, such that the data objects or their access patterns are not revealed to anyone, including the cloud provider, in the public cloud environment. We have created a detailed ontology describing the oblivious cloud storage models and role based access controls that should be in place to manage this risk. We have developed an algorithm to store cloud data using oblivious data structure defined in this paper. We have also implemented the ObliviCloudManager application that allows users to manage their cloud data by validating it before storing it in an oblivious data structure. Our application uses role-based access control model and collection based document management to store and retrieve data efficiently. Cloud consumers can use our system to define policies for storing data obliviously and manage storage on untrusted cloud platforms even if they are unfamiliar with the underlying technology and concepts of oblivious data structures.

Ensuring privacy of Big Data managed on the cloud is critical to ensure consumer confidence. Cloud providers publish privacy policy documents outlining the steps they take to ensure data and consumer privacy. These documents are available as large text documents that require manual effort and time to track and manage. We have developed a semantically rich ontology to describe the privacy policy documents and built a database of several policy documents as instances of this ontology. We next extracted rules from these policy documents based on deontic logic which can be used to automate management of data privacy. In this paper we describe our ontology in detail along with the results of our analysis of privacy policies of prominent cloud services.

To effectively manage cloud based services, organizations need to continuously monitor the performance metrics listed in the Cloud service contracts. However, these legal documents, like Service Level Agreements (SLA) or privacy policy documents, are currently managed as plain text files meant principally for human consumption. Additionally, providers often define their own performance metrics for their services. These factors hinder the automation of SLA management and require manual effort to monitor the cloud service performance. We have significantly automated the process of extracting, managing and monitoring cloud SLA using natural language processing techniques and Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we describe our technical approach and the ontology that we have developed to describe, manage, and reason about cloud SLAs. We also describe the prototype system that we have developed to automatically extract information from legal Terms of Service that are available on cloud provider websites.

According to recent media reports, there has been a surge in the number of devices that are being connected to the Internet. The Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as Cyber-Physical Systems, is a collection of physical entities with computational and communication capabilities. The storage and computing power of these devices is often limited and their designs currently focus on ensuring functionality and largely ignore other requirements, including security and privacy concerns. We present the design of a framework that allows IoT devices to capture, represent, reason with, and enforce information sharing policies. We use Semantic Web technologies to represent the policies, the information to be shared or protected, and the IoT device context. We discuss use-cases where our design will help in creating an "intelligent" IoT device and ensuring data security and privacy using context-sensitive information sharing policies.

Cloud services are becoming an essential part of many organizations. Cloud providers have to adhere to security and privacy policies to ensure their users' data remains confidential and secure. Though there are some ongoing efforts on developing cloud security standards, most cloud providers are implementing a mish-mash of security and privacy controls. This has led to confusion among cloud consumers as to what security measures they should expect from the cloud services, and whether these measures would comply with their security and compliance requirements. We have conducted a comprehensive study to review the potential threats faced by cloud consumers and have determined the compliance models and security controls that should be in place to manage the risk. Based on this study, we have developed an ontology describing the cloud security controls, threats and compliances. We have also developed an application that classifies the security threats faced by cloud users and automatically determines the high level security and compliance policy controls that have to be activated for each threat. The application also displays existing cloud providers that support these security policies. Cloud consumers can use our system to formulate their security policies and find compliant providers even if they are not familiar with the underlying technology.

To efficiently utilize their cloud based services, consumers have to continuously monitor and manage the Service Level Agreements (SLA) that define the service performance measures. Currently this is still a time and labor intensive process since the SLAs are primarily stored as text documents. We have significantly automated the process of extracting, managing and monitoring cloud SLAs using natural language processing techniques and Semantic Web technologies. In this paper we describe our prototype system that uses a Hadoop cluster to extract knowledge from unstructured legal text documents. For this prototype we have considered publicly available SLA/terms of service documents of various cloud providers. We use established natural language processing techniques in parallel to speed up cloud legal knowledge base creation. Our system considerably speeds up knowledge base creation and can also be used in other domains that have unstructured data.

Cloud related legal documents, like terms of service or customer agreement are usually managed as plain text files. Hence extensive manual effort is required to monitor the cloud service performance by cross referencing the metrics and measures agreed upon in these documents. We have significantly automated the process of managing and monitoring cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) using semantic web technologies like OWL, RDF and SPARQL. In this paper, we describe in detail the cloud SLA ontology and the prototype that we have developed to illustrate how the SLA measures can be automatically extracted from legal Terms of Service that are available on cloud provider websites.

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. Traditional models of software development are not appropriate for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. In this paper, we describe a new integrated methodology for the life cycle of IT services delivered on the cloud and demonstrate how it can be used to represent and reason about services and service requirements and so automate service acquisition and consumption from the cloud. We have divided the IT service life cycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and describe the ontologies that we have developed to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. To show how this life cycle can automate the usage of cloud services, we describe a cloud storage prototype that we have developed. This methodology complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of a service and going beyond simple matchmaking.