The Ph.D. proposal addresses the complexity of building distributed applications and systems with Application Servers and Web Services middleware, respectively. Despite their flexible XML-based configuration, taming the ever growing complexity remains all but an easy task. To remedy such problems, the thesis proposes an ontology-based approach to support the management (i.e. development and administration) of Application Server and Web Services based applications. The ontology captures

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... s of, relationships between and behaviors of the components and services that are required for management purposes. The ontology is an explicit conceptual model with formal logic-based semantics. Therefore its descriptions of components and services may be queried, may foresight required actions, or may be checked to avoid inconsistent system configurationsduring development as well as during run time. Thus, the ontology-based approach retains the original flexibility, but it adds new capabilities for the developer and user of the system.