Web site created for semantic cloud API

John Willis of the IT Management blog is reporting that Reuven Cohen has created a new web site in support of the development and promotion of a Universal Cloud Interface. The concept, as Reuven reported today, revolves around some of the good work being done to address cloud taxonomy and ontology:

We are in a sense defining what cloud computing is by describing it's "components" and their relationships to one another. One that is capable of expressing cloud computing and its subsequent parts in terms of a consensus data model.

So in this effort we may actually be defining a dynamic computing model that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn' the meaning of related cloud & infrastructure resources based on an common ontology / taxonomy. In a sense, we are talking about the Semantic Web applied to API's or more broadly, a unified cloud interface.

The web site, created on the Google Code infrastructure, provides a central point for the definition and development of the UCI. Remember all that Simon Wardley has been saying about the need for open sourced standards? This is probably as good an example of a community supported effort as there is to date.

So far the membership is small, and consists of people who have been working closely with Reuven for the past few months on everything from CloudCamp to organizing the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. (Disclosure: My collegue, David Berenstein from Cisco, is among them.) However, I believe this list will grow steadily over the next few months, as people realize that there is something to what Reuven is saying; what we in fact may be looking for is an API that can describe other APIs. I, for one, want to see this concept explored in much more depth.

The only serious question I have is how the finished specification and sample code becomes an accepted standard, so to speak. Are we talking submission to an existing organization? Creation of a new one? (Please don't.) Acceptance without an official standards body (i.e. as open source)?

Truthfully, however, at this point those logistics don't really matter. What matters is that the cloud community is pushing for standard ontologies and taxonomies (very quickly, I might add), and there is a serious effort to translate all that into an API that will promote interoperability and choice in the cloud marketplace.

This may be the beginning of one of the most important standard APIs of the Intercloud. Interested? Join the community and get involved.