Ontology-Based Information Extraction from the Configuration Command Line of Network Routers

Knowledge extraction is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers from different disciplines, as a means to automate complex tasks that rely on bulk textual resources. However, the configuration of many devices in the networking field continues to be a labor intensive task, based on the human interpretation and manual entry of commands through a text-based user interface. Typically, these Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs) are both device and vendor-specific, and thus, commands differ syntactically and semantically for each configuration space. Because of this heterogeneity, CLIs always provide a “help” feature—i.e., short command descriptions encoded in natural language—aimed to unveil the semantics of configuration commands for network administrators. In this paper, we exploit this feature with the aim of automating the abstraction of device configurations in heterogeneous settings. In particular, we introduce an Ontology-Based Information Extraction (OBIE) system from the Command-Line Interface of network routers. We also present ORCONF, a domain Ontology for the Router CONFiguration domain, and introduce a semantic relatedness measure that quantifies the degree of interrelation among candidate concepts. The results obtained over the configuration spaces of two widely used network routers demonstrate that this is a promising line of research, with overall percentages of precision and recall of 93%, and 91%, respectively.