Welcome to the Ontology Systems Frequently Asked Questions. This FAQ covers answers to common questions we get asked when talking about what we do.
What does Ontology Systems do?
What’s different about Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD to other approaches?
What key industry challenges do you tackle?
What Revenue Assurance challenges do you tackle?
What is Ontology Systems’ Solution for Revenue Assurance?
What are the benefits of Ontology Systems’ Revenue Assurance Solution?
What Service Management challenges do you tackle?
What is Ontology Systems’ Solution for Service Management?
What are the benefits of Ontology Systems’ Service Management Solution?
What is a virtual Unified Service Model?
What are the benefits of a virtual Unified Service Model?
What benefits can Service Providers expect when using OSS/CAD?
What are ontologies and semantics?
How does OSS/CAD apply ontologies and semantics to an IT system?
Where have ontologies and semantics been used before?
Answers
Ontology Systems is a radically different provider of Revenue Assurance, Service Management, data and services migration and transformation software applications for communication and data center service providers.
What does Ontology Systems do?
Ontology Systems is the software company behind OSS/CADTM, a new semantics-based application that delivers a step change to the way in which service providers can improve Revenue Assurance and Service Management.
What’s different about Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD to other approaches?
Simply put, OSS/CAD uses existing “raw and dirty” OSS/BSS data to rapidly find the implied model relating customers, services and network assets.
This bottom-up approach is fast because it reuses the structure of data already present in existing systems. OSS/CAD can use this existing structure to find alignments which unify the separate OSS/BSS silos, and simultaneously identify the misalignments ultimately caused by poor data quality. OSS/CAD begins delivering results in weeks.
This is possible because of Ontology Systems semantic technology and it provides transparency and alignment across the entire OSS/BSS infrastructure and networks. Ultimately, OSS/CADTM enables the virtual unification of existing systems to solve the problem of siloed infrastructure data.
OSS/CAD is at the forefront of applying ontologies and semantics - technologies originally developed in military and intelligence applications - to deliver a breakthrough approach to reinterpreting business, operational and infrastructural data as a single virtual Unified Service Model.
What key industry challenges do you tackle?
Service providers today have too many complex siloed systems. Any single customer or service or network asset is affected by the complex dependencies of multiple systems: operators struggle to ‘see the services in the data’.
As a direct result of this situation, operators are unable to improve their Revenue Assurance and Service Management processes which are directly responsible for OPEX in the communications industry being twice the average of other industries.
What Revenue Assurance challenges do you tackle?
It is well known that Operators have stranded assets and billing inconsistencies across their product ranges. Ongoing revenue leakage is unavoidable due to poor OSS/BSS data quality, uncoordinated silo processes or as the result of emergency fixes (e.g. erroneous entry of a customer’s interface results in both a stranded asset and free service).
Revenue recovery is expensive and prone to failure because the needed ‘joined up’ customer, services and network inventory view is obscured by poor quality data and fragmentation across OSS/BSS silos. It’s very difficult to find existing revenue leakages and to keep new leaks from springing up.
The usual remedy is a custom project, justified after the sum of the revenue leakages exceeds the project cost. However, this approach is economically wasteful because it doesn’t solve the underling core alignment and ‘dirty data’ issue. A more systematic remedy has proved tremendously expensive because of the massive ongoing integration cost associated with the maintenance of the many sources, schemas and transformations. Ontology changes this situation.
What is Ontology Systems’ Solution for Revenue Assurance?
Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD has cracked the problem of dynamically aligning dirty OSS/BSS silo data by applying ontologies and semantics to reinterpret business, operational and infrastructural data as a single virtual Unified Service Model.
Deployed in just several weeks and running continuously to spot new leaks, OSS/CAD combines existing raw OSS/BSS data and operator knowledge to create and maintain a virtual unified model. The dynamic model outputs daily reports listing stranded assets and billing misalignments.
What are the benefits of Ontology Systems’ Revenue Assurance Solution?
- Immediate savings: OSS/CAD’s semantic approach has delivered savings in weeks (not months or years) with up to 8 real OSS/BSS systems
- Comprehensive savings: Most revenue audits take a superficial approach to complex of OSS data, they miss addressable revenue leakage
- Minimizes loss and risk: OSS/CAD stops revenue leaks when they occur, when it is more likely to recover costs, not 6 or 12 months later when a consultancy project finally runs.
What Service Management challenges do you tackle?
Service providers must lower the considerable OPEX costs incurred by the prioritization of the thousands of daily faults that impact customers and revenue as well as ensuring the configuration and maintenance operations do not create consequential service faults.
The ideal solution, which provides a joined-up view of customers, services and network inventory, is:
- Obscured by poor quality data and fragmentation
- Expensive to maintain due to continuous integration of many B/OSS data sources
- The traditional implemented solution involved difficult to maintain integrations and which are sensitive to data quality and need constant rework.
Many operators have “given up” and use expensive manual methods to find service dependencies.
What is Ontology Systems’ Solution for Service Management?
Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD has cracked the problem of dynamically aligning dirty B/OSS silo data by applying ontologies and semantics to reinterpret business, operational and infrastructural data as a single virtual Unified Service Model.
By starting with real OSS/BSS data, OSS/CAD produces a dynamic model implied by the existing data. This avoids the design and mediation pain of traditional integration leading to a faster, cheaper and, crucially maintainable solution.
Deployed in just several weeks and running continuously to identifying dependencies as they appear, OSS/CAD combines existing raw OSS/BSS data and operator knowledge to create and maintain a virtual unified model. The dynamic model outputs daily reports listing updated Inventory-to-customer reports and 360° customer views.
What are the benefits of Ontology Systems’ Service Management Solution?
- Immediate SLA Penalty savings: Network events can be automatically prioritized by cost so that events are processed before the MTTI/F SLA timeframes expire
- OPEX savings: By automating lengthy manual processes
- Minimizes risk of critical failures: changes and faults can be matched against critical customers and services.
What is a virtual Unified Service Model?
A virtual Unified Service Model (vUSM) is a single model of customers, services and infrastructure which is inferred through the use of semantics and ontologies from the data held in the OSS/BSS systems rather than mapped by directly integrating the systems.
OSS architecture reference frameworks, such as TM Forum’s SID and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), require a Unified Service Model in order to enable a wide range of organizational functions, including service-centric network management, customer service assurance, automation in product lifecycle management and automation in service fulfillment. Current methods for achieving such a unified model suffer from limitations in agility brought about by the closely coupled – and therefore inflexible – nature of their approaches.
What are the benefits of a virtual Unified Service Model?
The primary benefit of a virtual Unified Service Model is that it provides a single, transparent knowledge-based view of the services that run across a service provider’s systems. In turn, this enables a set of applications which include:
- Service Impact and Fault Prioritisation
- Overall OSS/BSS Data Integrity and Alignment
- SLA Impact Analysis
- Stranded Asset Identification
- Revenue Assurance
- 360 degree Customer View
- Legacy Migration and Transformation
- Unified Topology and Inventory Views
- Change Management and Customer Notification.
Additional benefits from the OSS/CAD ontology-based virtual Unified Service Model include:
- Use of existing data defers replacement of existing systems
- Incremental deployment of the model reduces the risk associated with big-bang transformation projects
- Inference solves the problem of misaligned data and enables the presentation of a single view
- Increased flexibility and lower brittleness lower the cost of ownership of the resulting system compared to a traditional data integration project.
What benefits can Service Providers expect when using OSS/CAD?
OSS/CAD can deliver benefits across the service provider organization:
Operations
- Greater and more agile control of OSS/BSS systems
- Improved data integrity and correct alignment of silo systems
- Cost and revenue based Service Impact Analysis and job prioritization
- Easier migration and transformation
- Reduced design time for new services
- Building of the service model done dynamically
- Reduced maintenance of OSS and BSS interfaces
Business
- Improves management of the customer experience
- Provides revenue assurance
- Enables Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to be met
- Credible alternative to forklift BSS/OSS systems replacement and transformation
- Defers CAPEX via extension of legacy system lifecycle
- Reduces OPEX through cost-based service impact prioritization of faults and maintenance and improved silo data alignment
Customer
- Provides a single view of services
- Improves quality of services and speed of provider response
- Enables service transparency
OSS/CAD has three core components:
OSS/CAD Modeller - enables the creation, management and deployment of vUSMs.
OSS/CAD OntoPacks - modules which extend OSS/CAD out-of-the-box functionality for applications such as connecting to OSS systems and service impact analysis.
OSS/CAD Runtime - a peer-to-peer distributed execution environment which hosts OSS/CADTM applications. The most basic configuration consists of a single processing node, but further nodes can be added to a deployment dynamically, with zero downtime, to manage performance, availability and resilience concerns.
What are ontologies and semantics?
In computer science, an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts in a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to define and reason about the properties of that domain.
In computer science, semantics is the study of the meaning of programs and data.
How does OSS/CAD apply ontologies and semantics to an IT system?
OSS/CAD uses ontologies and semantics to “virtualize” the Unified Service Model
Ontologies - rather than object models - are used to describe key concepts and relationships in the model.
Other semantic technologies, such as inference engines and reasoners, use the ontologies to recognize meaning in existing OSS/BSS system data to infer the virtual Unified Service Model.
Ontology has patents pending for OSS/CAD's use of semantic data processing.
Where have ontologies and semantics been used before?
Ontologies have been used for many years in military and intelligence systems where an overall operational picture needs to be formed from a large set of data sources, many of which are not under the direct control of the end-user organization. Ontologies provide a practical way to pull that view together.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web initiative makes extensive use of ontologies to provide interoperable descriptions of the meaning of content on the Web.
Many other industries are now embracing the use of ontologies and semantics for example law enforcement and bioinformatics.
A significant operational advantage of OSS/CAD is that there is no requirement for a large model design and integration project. This enables OSS/CAD to be deployed rapidly and incrementally with initial phases complete within weeks.
Please feel free to contact us should you have any unanswered questions.
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 Taming the OSS/BSS Beast. Exploiting existing solutions and data to deliver results  |
Ontology’s unique approach will help CSPs by providing them seamless service modeling and service management capability in an agile, cost-effective manner. Arindam Banerjee Director, Enabling Technologies Service Provider Software Solutions Yankee Group, 2009  |
