An Approach for Managing Service Dependencies with XML and the Resource Description Framework

We describe a novel approach for applying XML, XPath, and Resource Description Framework (RDF) to the problem of describing, querying and computing the dependencies among services in a distributed computing system. This becomes increasingly important in today's networked environments where applications and services rely on both local and outsourced sub-services. However, service dependencies are not made explicit in today's systems, thus making the task of problem determination particularly difficult. A key contribution of the paper is a web-based architecture for retrieving and handling dependency information from various managed resources. Its core component is a dependency query facility allowing the application of queries and filters to dependency models; its output is a consolidated dependency graph that can then be used by fault management applications to perform additional problem determination tasks or event correlation. The definition of an XML-based notation for specifying dependencies facilitates information sharing between the components involved in the process.