Omani research team develops centralised cloud services repository

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MUSCAT - The 34th issue of Scientific Insights magazine, being published by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, has examined an Omani research project that developed technical solutions for cloud services and created a central electronic system that searches for offers available in various websites of different service providers, including categorising and saving them, for those seeking cloud services, whether they are individuals or institutions.

The research project, titled ‘A Centralised Cloud Services Repository (CCSR) Framework for Optimal Cloud Service Advertisement Discovery from Heterogenous Web Portals’, was conducted by Dr Asma bint Musabah al Kalbani, Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Head of the Scientific Research Department at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences in Ibri.

Cloud computing refers to providing information technology resources such as software and hardware as services that can be accessed over the Internet instead of buying them as expensive products that require installation, operation, maintenance and others. In this regard, Dr Asma said that the idea of the project was to develop technical solutions for cloud computing technology. The project aimed to solve the lack of an independent central market that allows those who want to request a specific cloud service to search and access advertisements and offers of cloud computing services available from providers of those services globally.

Dr Asma elaborated that the project's central system searched for offers and advertisements for cloud services from the Internet and provides them in a central repository that later allows the service requester to access and browse these advertisements with less effort. Moreover, the system consisted of two main parts: The Harvesting as-a-Service (HaaS) and the service repository module. The Harvesting as-a-Service is a developed technical tool to collect data from various websites that offer cloud computing services and store them in the data warehouse, which is responsible for storing and organising the data extracted from various websites in this central repository, and its role is to assist the service requester in the process of searching and accessing for various offers and advertisements for cloud computing services.

Concerning the research project results, Dr Asma confirmed that the experiments proved the effectiveness of the developed system that enabled the consumer to search and retrieve advertisements for cloud services with a higher efficiency of 90 per cent than its accuracy. The developed harvesting service tool was also compared with traditional tools used in data collection on a large scale, as the tool proved its efficiency in extracting data from websites with high quality and in a short time. Dr Asma recommended to conduct more experiments to develop the infrastructure of this central market.

The research team consisted of principal investigator Dr Asma al Kalbani, Dr Walayat Hussain, Lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and Dr Jung Yoon Kim, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Game, Gachon University, South Korea.

In regard to the importance of the research project, Dr Asma said: The research was published in the IEEE Access journal of the world-renowned IEEE organisation, and it has a high impact factor equal to 4.098 in 2021 and for five years similar to 4.676, which are two distinct indicators in the field of computer science research. There is much reliance on this type of research cooperation and these distinguished indicators to supplement the remaining research indicators to contribute to raising the percentage of research output in the Sultanate of Oman and raising the level of national universities and research centres in international rankings.

Scientific Insights is a scientific journal published every three months by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in both Arabic and English. To read more interesting articles in the fields of science and innovation, interested readers can access the magazine online through the ministry’s official social media channels.