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Applications of Ontologies in Collaborative Software Development

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Collaborative Software Engineering

Abstract

Making distributed teams more efficient is one main goal of Collaborative Software Development (CSD) research. To this end, ontologies, which are models that capture a shared understanding of a specific domain, provide key benefits. Ontologies have formal, machine-interpretable semantics that allow to define semantic mappings for heterogeneous data and to infer implicit knowledge at run-time. Extending development infrastructures and software architectures with ontologies (of problem and solution domains) will address coordination and knowledge sharing challenges in activities such as documentation, requirements specification , component reuse, error handling, and test case management. The purpose of this article is to provide systematic account of how ontologies can be applied in CSD, and to describe benefits of both existing applications such as “semantic wikis ” as well as visionary scenarios such as a “Software Engineering Semantic Web ”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    W3 Consortium, see http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODA/

  2. 2.

    Object Management Group, see http://www.omg.org/ontology/

  3. 3.

    Resource Description Framework, cf. http://www.w3.org/RDF/

  4. 4.

    Web Ontology Language, cf. http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/

  5. 5.

    Protégé: http://protege.stanford.edu/

  6. 6.

    http://www.teamweaver.org

  7. 7.

    see e.g. http://doapspace.org/

  8. 8.

    http://code.google.com/projects/baetle

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FZI Research Center for Information Technology, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Hans-Jörg Happel

  2. Technische Universität München, 85748, Garching, Germany

    Walid Maalej

  3. University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Stefan Seedorf

Authors
  1. Hans-Jörg Happel
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  2. Walid Maalej
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  3. Stefan Seedorf
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Correspondence to Hans-Jörg Happel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Werderstr. 47, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Ivan Mistrík

  2. Dept. Computer Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    John Grundy

  3. Donald Bren School of Information &, University of California, Irvine, Donald Bren Hall 5029, Irvine, 92697-3440, USA

    André Hoek

  4. Dept. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, 95064, USA

    Jim Whitehead

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Happel, HJ., Maalej, W., Seedorf, S. (2010). Applications of Ontologies in Collaborative Software Development. In: Mistrík, I., Grundy, J., Hoek, A., Whitehead, J. (eds) Collaborative Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_6

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