Data and Computation Interoperability in Internet Services

Data and Computation Interoperability in Internet Services
Sergey Boldyrev, Dmitry Kolesnikov, Ora Lassila, Ian Oliver
Nokia Corporation
Espoo, Finland
e-mail: {sergey.boldyrev, dmitry.kolesnikov, ora.lassila ian.oliver}@nokia.com
Abstract— The rapid shift of technology towards
cloud computing requires a next generation dis-
tributed systems that should be seamlessly spanned
around heterogeneous concepts of the information
providers, cloud infrastructures, and terminal equip-
ments. The framework for interoperability is required;
a detailed methods and set of supporting tools for
developing an end-to-end architecture where aspects
of data and computation semantics, scalability, se-
curity and privacy are resolved and leveraged in
order to provide a end-to-end foundation of such
systems. Our objectives are to define the scope of
the framework and to identify technology choices
from perspective of scalable technology and busi-
ness models with high elasticity.
Keywords- service; semantic web; data; ontology;
computation; privacy; latency; cloud computing; in-
teroperability;
I. INTRODUCTION
The ICT industry is undergoing a major shift
towards cloud computing. From the technologi-
cal standpoint, this entails incorporating both “in-
house” and outsourced storage and computing
infrastructures, integrating multiple partners and
services, and providing users a seamless expe-
rience across multiple platforms and devices. On
the business side, there is an anticipation of im-
proved flexibility, including the flexibility of introduc-
ing new, multisided business models where value
can be created through interactions with multiple
(different types of) players. Many companies are
trying to answer questions like “Who might find this
information valuable?”, “What would happen if we
provided our service for free of charge”, and “What
if my competitor(s) did so?”. The answers to such
questions are hightlighting opportunities for disrup-
tion and identification of vulnerabilities [13]. Thus,
slicing and investigating technological components
we are seeking the answers in further thinking and
collaboration work with industrial researches and
academic society.
In a world of fully deployed and available
cloud infrastructures we can anticipate the emer-
gence of distributed systems that can seamlessly
span the “information spaces” of multiple hardware,
software, information and infrastructure providers.
Such systems can take advantage of finely granular
and accountable processing services, can integrate
heterogeneous information sources by negotiat-
ing their associated semantics, and ultimately free
users of mundane challenges and details of tech-
nology usage (such as connectivity, locus of data
or computation, etc.). We foresee greater reuse of
information and computational tasks.
Some of the inputs of this work have been the
work of Marco Rodriguez about the RDF virtual
machine, the Haskell state monads and various
papers about out of order execution like [5], [6] The
objective was to realize and to describe semanti-
cally a scenario in which computation can be repre-
sented in a machine understandable way and sent
to another execution environment where, using the
semantic, it can be reconstructed and computed.
The computations target are not low level machine
level instructions like in Rodriguez work, nor simply
functions, but a particular kind of function that can
be executed or put in chain with other functions of
the same type like it happens with monadic values
that can be put in chain with monadic operators like

“bind”. Another important objective of the semantic
representation of computation in this work was to
realize a system in which computations originated
by a certain HW/SW combination, can be executed
independently from the executor operating system
or hardware architecture. This new computation
paradigm requires explicit techniques to facilitate
a computation management within distributed envi-
ronments. Non-functional aspects such us privacy,
security and performance needs to be controlled
using the behavior analysis as the system sustain
load. As such design and best practices for perfor-
mance optimizations within network and software
components is widely studies by multiple projects
[9], [10], [11], [12], etc. The computation man-
agement targets are not low level optimization of
protocol or software stack behavior but accountable
mechanism enabling orchestration of computations
across boundaries of environments.
In order for us to understand the opportunities
and – perhaps more importantly – the challenges of
such a future, we must establish a clear framework
for interoperability. Aspects of data and compu-
tation semantics, performance and scalability of
computation and networking, as well as threats
to security and privacy must be discussed and
elaborated. This paper aims to be the beginning
of this discussion.
We begin in Section 2 with informal definition
of data semantics via set of declared dependen-
cies and constrains used to reflect data processing
rules. Section 3 presents a computations in a form
of accountable components that can be leveraged
and reused in a larger, distributed systems. Section
4 discusses the role of system behavior analysis
in order to achieve adequate level of system ac-
countability. Finally Section 4, privacy enforcement
are discussed by which ownership, granularity and
content semantic are managed.
II. DATA
A. About Semantics
In the broader sense, in the context of data,
the term semantics is understood as the “meaning”
of data. In this document, we take a narrow, more
pragmatic view, and informally define semantics
to be the set of declared dependencies and con-
straints that define how data is to be processed. In
a contemporary software system, some part of the
system (some piece of executable software) always
defines the semantics of any particular data item.
In a very practical sense, the “meaning” of a data
item arises from one of two sources:
1) The relationships this item has with other
data items and/or definitions (including the
semantics of the relationships themselves). In
this case, software “interprets” what we know
about the data item (e.g., the data schema
or ontology). An elementary example of this
is object-oriented polymorphism, where the
runtime system can pick the right software to
process an object because the class of the
object happens to be a subclass of a “known”
class; more elaborate cases include ontology-
based reasoning that infers new things about
an object.
2) Some software (executing in the system run-
time) that “knows” how to process this data
item directly (including the system runtime
itself, as this typically “grounds” the semantics
of primitive datatypes, etc.). In this case, the
semantics is “hard-wired” in the software.
All software systems have semantics, whether the
semantics is defined implicitly or explicitly. As for
data specifically, the semantics are typically de-
fined explicitly, in the form of datatype definitions,
class definitions, ontology definitions, etc. (these
fall under category #1 above; semantics of those
things that fall under category #2 are typically either
implicit or in some cases explicit in the form of
external documentation).

B. Constituent Technologies of “Data Infrastruc-
ture”
From a practical standpoint, all applications
need to query, transmit, store and manipulate data.
All these functions have dependencies to tech-
nologies (or categories of technologies) which we
in aggregate shall call Data Infrastructure. The
constituent technologies themselves have various
dependencies, illustrated (in a simplified form) in
Figure 1. From the data semantics standpoint, we
are mostly here focused on the technologies inside
the box labeled “Data Modeling Framework”.
Application
Data Modeling Framework
Storage Infrastructure
Internal Data
Domain Models
Object Model
Queries
Query Language Serialization
Transmission
Schema Language
Query Engine Storage
Figure 1. Dependencies in “Data Infrastructure”
Domain Models: Application semantics is
largely defined via a set of domain models which
establish the necessary vocabulary of the (real-
world) domain of an application. Meaningful inter-
operability between two systems typically requires
the interpretation of such models.
Schema Language: Domain models are ex-
pressed using some schema language. Typically
such languages establish a vocabulary for dis-
cussing types (classes), their structure and their
relationship with other types. Examples of schema
languages include SQL DDL, W3C’s OWL and XML
Schema as well as Microsoft’s CSDL. Class defi-
nitions in object-oriented programming languages
(e.g., Java) can also be considered as schema
languages.
Query Language: An application’s queries are
expressed in some query language; this language
may either be explicit (such as SQL or SPARQL)
or implicit (in the sense that what effectively are
queries are embedded in a programming lan-
guage). Queries are written using vocabularies es-
tablished by a query language (the “mechanics” of
a query) and relevant domain models.
Serialization: For the purposes of transmission
(and sometimes also for storage) a “syntactic”,
external form of data has to be established. A stan-
dardized serialization syntax allows interoperating
systems to exchange data in an implementation-
neutral fashion. Serialization syntaxes do not have
to be dependent on domain models.1
Object Model: Ultimately, there are some def-
initions about the structure common to all data;
we refer to these definitions as an object model
(in some literature and in other contexts, the term
metamodel is also used). Essentially, an object
model is the definition of “what all data looks like”
and thus forms the basis for a schema language,
a query language and a serialization syntax. Ex-
amples of object models include W3C’s XML DOM
and RDF.2
C. On Metadata and Provenance
Interoperable exchange of data can often ben-
efit from metadata to describe the data being inter-
changed. Typically, such exchange occurs in use
cases involving management of data that originates
in multiple sources (and may – independently of
sources – have multiple owners) and/or data that
1In practice, developers often have a hard time separating
conceptual views of data, domain models, and like, from con-
crete, syntactic manifestations of data. This has lead to all kinds
of unnecessary dependencies in the implementations of large
systems. Consider yourselves warned.
2We are referring to RDF’s graph-based meta-model, not RDF
Schema which should be considered a schema language.

is subject to one or more policies (security, privacy,
etc.). Much of the meta-information we aspire to
record about data is in various ways associated
with data provenance. Over the years lots of work
has been invested in provenance in various ways
– [2] provides a general overview of these efforts
in the database field. In cases where a multi-cloud
solution is used to implement workflows that pro-
cess data, we may also be interested in solutions
for workflow provenance.
In practice, incorporating all or even any meta-
information into one’s (domain) data schema or
ontology is difficult, and easily results in a very
complicated data model that is hard to understand
and maintain. It can, in fact, be observed that
provenance-related metadata attributes (such as
source and owner) are cross-cutting aspects of
associated data, and by and large are independent
of the domain models in question. The problem is
similar to the problem of cross-cutting aspects in
software system design, a situation3
that has led to
the development of Aspect-Oriented Programming
[1].
From the pragmatic standpoint, the granularity
of data described by specific metadata is an impor-
tant consideration: Do we record metadata at the
level of individual objects (in which case “mixing”
metadata with the domain schema is achievable in
practice), or even at finer (i.e., “intra-object”) gran-
ularity; a possible solution to the latter is presented
in [4].
III. COMPUTATION
From the computation perspective we are
faced with a task to enable and create consistent
(from the semantics standpoint) and accountable
components that can be leveraged and reused
in a larger, distributed information system. This
translates to several pragmatic objectives, including
(but not limited to) the following:
3The motivating situation is sometimes referred to as the
“tyranny of dominant decomposition” [3].
• Design and implementation of scenarios where
computation can be described and repre-
sented in a system-wide understandable way,
enabling computation to be “migrated” (trans-
mitted) from one computational environment
to another. This transmission would involve
reconstruction of the computational task at the
receiving end to match the defined semantics
of task and data involved. It should be noted
that in scenarios like this the semantics of
computation are described at a fairly high,
abstract level (rather than, say, in terms of low-
level machine instructions).
• Construction of a system where larger compu-
tational tasks can be decomposed into smaller
tasks or units of computation, independent of
what the eventual execution environment(s) of
these tasks (that is, independent of hardware
platforms or operating systems).
Traditional approaches to “mobile code” have
included various ways to standardize the runtime
execution environment for code, ranging from hard-
ware architectures and operating systems to vari-
ous types of virtual machines. In a heterogeneous
configuration of multiple device and cloud envi-
ronments, these approaches may or may not be
feasible, and we may want to opt for a very high
level (possibly purely declarative) description of
computation (e.g., describing computation as a set
of goals to be satisfied).
High-level, declarative descriptions of com-
putation (e.g., functional programming languages
such as Erlang) afford considerable latitude for
the target execution environment to decide how
computation is to be organized and effected. This
way, computation can be scheduled optimally with
respect to various constraints of the execution en-
vironment (latency budget, power or other resource
consumption, remaining battery level, etc.) and de-
cisions can also be made to migrate computation
to other environments if needed.

IV. MANAGED CLOUD PERFORMANCE
A new outlined paradigm of distributed sys-
tems requires an explicit orchestration of com-
putation across Edge, Cloud and Core depend-
ing on components states and resource demand,
through the proper exploit of granular and therefore
accountable mechanisms. The behavior analysis
of the software components using live telemetry
gathered as the cloud sustain production load is
mandatory.
End-to-end latency is seen by us as a major
metric for quality assessment of software architec-
ture and underlying infrastructure. It yields both
user-oriented SLA, the objectives for each Cloud
stage. The ultimate goal is the ability to quanti-
tatively evaluate and trade-off software quality at-
tributes to ensure competitive end-to-end latency
of Internet Services.
On another hand, the task of performance
analysis is to design systems as cost effectively as
possible with a predefined grade of service when
we know the future traffic demand and the capacity
of system elements. Furthermore, it is the task to
specify methods for controlling that the actual grade
of service is fulfilling the requirements, and also
to specify emergency actions when systems are
overloaded or technical faults occur.
When applying Managed Cloud Performance
in practice, a series of decision problem concerning
both short-term and long-term arrangements ap-
pears:
• provide granular latency control for diverse
data and computational load in hybrid Cloud
architectures;
• resolution of short term capacity decisions in-
clude for example the determination of optimal
configuration, the number of lives servers or
migration of computation;
• resolution of long term capacity decisions such
as decisions concerning the development and
extension of data- and service architecture,
choice of technology, etc;
• control of SLA at different levels, e.g. consumer
services, platform components, etc;
If performance metrics of a solution is inad-
equate then business is impacted. It has been
reported by multiple sources [11]: 100ms of la-
tency on Amazon cost them 1% in sales; Goldman
Sachs makes profit of a 500 ms trading advantage.
Goldman Sachs used Erlang for the high-frequency
trading programs.
The role of software behavioral analysis there-
fore is crucial in order to achieve proper level of
accountability of the whole system, constructed out
of the number of the granular components of Data
and Computation, thus, creating a solid fundament
for the Privacy requirements.
V. PRIVACY IN THE CLOUD
The scope of privacy enforcement being pro-
posed here is to provide mechanisms by which
users can finely tune the ownership, granularity,
content, semantics and visibility of their data to-
wards other parties. We should note that security
is very closely linked with privacy; security, how-
ever, tends to be about access control, whether
an agent has access to a particular piece of data,
whereas privacy is about constraints on the usage
of data. Because we have not had the technological
means to limit usage, we typically cast privacy
as an access control problem; this precludes us
from implementing some use cases that would be
perfectly legitimate, but because the agent cannot
access relevant data we cannot even discuss what
usage is legal and what is not. In other words,
security controls whether a particular party has
access to a particular item of data, while privacy
controls whether that data can or will be used for
a particular purpose.
As Nokia builds its infrastructure for data, the
placement and scope of security, identity and anal-
ysis of that data become imperative. We can think
of the placement of privacy as described in Figure
2 (note that in this diagram, by “ontology” we really
mean semantics).
Given any data infrastructure we require at

minimum a security model to support the integrity
of the data, an identity model to denote the owner
or owners of data (and ideally also provenance of
the data) and an ontology to provide semantics or
meaning to the data. Given these we can construct
a privacy model where the flow of data through
the system can be monitored and to establish
boundaries where the control points for the data
can be placed.
Figure 2. Privacy, overview
VI. CONCLUSIONS
As stated in above, the rapidly shifting tech-
nology environment raises serious questions for
executives about how to help their companies to
capitalize on the transformation that is underway.
Three trends – anything as a service, multisided
business models and innovation from the bottom
of the pyramid – augur far-reaching changes in
the business environment and require radical shifts
in strategy. The fine-grained (and thus easily ac-
countable) software frameworks allow customers
to monitor, measure, customize, and bill for asset
use at much more fine-grained level than before.
Particularly, b2b customers would benefit since
such granular services would allow the purchasing
of fractions of service and to account for them as
a variable cost rather than consider some capital
investments and corresponding overhead.
Therefore, the driving agenda above can be
seen as a creation of tools for the next devel-
oper and consumer applications, computing plat-
form and backend infrastructure, backed up by
application technologies to enable qualitative leap
in services’ offering, from the perspectives of scal-
able technology and business models with high
elasticity, supporting future strategic growth areas
and maintenance requirements.
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