Flowstats: an ontology based network management tool

One of the problems that hinders large scale network management tasks is the number of possible heterogeneous data sources that provide network information and how to focus on a desired network segment without requiring a deep knowledge of the network structure. This work investigates how to intelligently and efficiently refine and manage a vast amount of network monitoring data sources, by using artificial intelligent reasoning through an intuitive user interface. We aim to minimise the user interaction and required user knowledge when searching for the desired network monitoring information by refining the presented information based on user choices. The concept of Ontology is utilised to create a knowledge base of multiple different aspects of our testbed: Internal Management structure, Physical Location of data sources, and network switch meta-data.