Capturing and using the operational semantics of large distributed systems: Sharing common application requirements in virtual organisations

Abstract

Organisations may wish to use a standards-defined distributed system in a global sense but also have a requirement for non-standard local behaviour. This reflects the production of, and desire to use, organisational knowledge developed over time. The efficient and effective management of this knowledge can be a deciding factor in an organisation’s success or failure. Virtual organisations, where members share a problem-solving purpose rather than a location-based or formal organisation, have no formal bodies to manage change requests and may be restricted in how they can apply their knowledge. These organisations are also the most likely to seek divergent local behaviour since their locale is formed by the members’ desire to solve a particular problem and this problem-based approach may lead to user requirements that exist only in that virtual organisation. We describe a method for capturing and representing operational semantics so that global and local behaviour can co-exist without leading to operational impairment in either sphere. The approach applies to virtual and traditional organisations equally well as both entities can use it to integrate their local knowledge and requirements into a much larger framework and, potentially, share these with their collaborators. We illustrate our approach with reference to our implementation of an ontologically enhanced Domain Name System (DNS) server.