A Question and Answering System for Management of Cloud Service Level Agreements

Abstract

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 knowledge base 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.