In this first of two articles, the authors start building a case for semantic modeling as a potential solution for cloud computing interoperability and portability. They recognize that cloud computing “standards” are essentially nonexistent today, although organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the direction of US Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, are working to encourage the evolution of such standards with the Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC) initiative [1].

Given the current wide variety of cloud implementations, it is probably too early to expect any great demand for interoperability standards, but they will eventually be needed. Semantic modeling, with a focus not on applications but on common data and workflow definitions, should help meet that need. The authors propose semantic annotations to earlier syntactic standards such as the Web services description language (WSDL). In the second article [2], they present more specifics for cloud portability, data modeling, and services.