Applying semantics and data interoperability principles for cloud management systems

In today's IT systems, the enormous amount of data and the increasing demand to produce knowledge (by aggregating data), generate the necessity of re-thinking if current information systems are optimally designed for managing such amount of information. If the answer is no, then what are the best practices to make more efficient the managing operations of data in those knowledge-based systems? As consequence of the generation of big quantities of data, it is becoming more difficult to design efficient management information systems. Likewise migrating to cloud-based systems the design of the systems and their respectively applications are more complex. This book chapter focuses on semantic interoperability, a particular ontology-engineering problem, which relates semantics and management systems. This chapter book aims at defining application design principles and methodological modelling procedures to create alternative solutions to the scientific and technological challenge of enabling information interoperability in cross-domain applications and management systems. Particular interest is focused on cloud management systems. This book chapter describes and explains the role semantics plays to provide solutions tackling the problem about information interoperability, discuss concepts about ontology engineering and introduce methodological approaches to formal representation of data and information models, in order to facilitate information interoperability between heterogeneous, complex and distributed information management systems.