The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group is developing the Cloud Interaction Ecosystem Language (CIEL). This is a simple language for describing Cloud interactions. It is intended for use by business users and IT vendors or in-house IT departments, to explain and visualize Cloud concepts and services easily. The aim of the workshop was to help the participants to understand and develop ideas around ecosystem concepts, Enterprise Architecture, and Cloud Computing.
The meeting reviewed the current state of development of CIEL. There is a substantial body of material, including notes on the language structure, proposed symbols for the notation, and links to formal definitions.
The meeting then clarified the overall scope of the project. There are two key aspects of CIEL:
- The definition of a graphical notation for entities related to ecosystem Cloud Computing
- The identification and standardization of attributes of those entities
It may be appropriate to define the graphical notation by giving examples, and not to try to specify it formally. The attributes should, however, be specified formally, and this specification may be linked to other formal metadata description languages, including RDF and UDEF.