Archived: 8 March 2006
We seek to modify the behaviour of a distributed system, such as the Domain Name System (DNS), quickly, efficiently and robustly while only affecting a prescribed set of clients and servers. Thus, small sites and virtual organisations can restructure their information within the DNS to suit their needs without compromising global interaction. We achieve this by describing the DNS using knowledge domains and shared ontologies, resulting in faster reconfiguration and control over the area of effect of system changes. This paper focusses on the addition of operational semantics to the ontological model, in addition to the logical relationships, data structures and data representations.
Keywords: operational semantics, distributed systems, distributed applications, distributed architectures