A semantic engine for porting applications to the cloud and among clouds

In this paper, we present an engine based on semantic technologies aimed at supporting cloud applications developers, in the tasks of discovering functionalities, APIs, and resources needed for the application development through semantic based agnostic (vendor independent) representations of such application components, and representation of generic programming concepts and patterns, including application domain related ones. It handles, maintains, and exposes to the user in a graphical way the semantic descriptions of application domain concepts, application-related concepts, general design patterns and programming functionalities, specific API implementations and cloud resources, layering the knowledge base in four layers. The semantic engine is a component of the European project mOSAICs framework. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.