Semantically supported SLA negotiation

The evolution of services market raises the need for automatic support for negotiating service use criteria. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to develop a common understanding of the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations together with reasoning can increase the level of flexibility and automation in SLA management. A framework is presented for SLA negotiation allowing the two parties to use their own terminologies.