Patent Document ID: 8615585
Application ID: 12789653

Base Claim:
1. An apparatus for provisioning computing network resources to one or more users in accordance with a service, the apparatus comprising: a memory; and a processor coupled to the memory and configured to maintain an ontology data structure for provisioning and managing a service, the ontology data structure comprising: a leaf level of a plurality of service offering nodes, the service offering nodes being data structures containing service offering information of services offered to a user by a service provider; one or more internal levels, each of the internal levels having one or more parent node data structures; one or more edge data structures, at least one of the one or more edge data structures having hierarchy information that defines a subordinate relationship either from one of the service offering nodes to a parent node or from a lower parent node to a higher parent node, one or more of the parent nodes having attributes that are common to each of the nodes that have a subordinate relation to the respective parent node; one or more resource data structures that is associated with one or more of the nodes, the resource data structures defining one or more physical network resources required to provision to a user to provide a service described in the service offering information; one or more provisioning processes associated with one or more of the nodes, wherein when the provisioning processes are executed, one or more of the physical network resources are provisioned to the user in an order that the user can use the service; one or more status data structures defining a status change of one or more of the nodes, the status data structure that defines one or more configurations changes required to change the service offering provided from a first offering to a second offering; and one or more status processes that comprise the steps performed to change the configuration defined in the respective status data structure to implement the change from the first offering to the second offering for a user.

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Claim 5:
5. An apparatus, as in claim 1 , wherein said ontology data structure is associated with a particular service offering from a particular service provider.