Community-oriented software engineering ontology evolution

Abstract

Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) defines common shareable software engineering knowledge and typically provides software engineering concepts: what the concepts are, how they are related, and why they are related. These concepts facilitate common understanding of software engineering knowledge across multiple international software development sites. The SE Ontology is in machine understandable form to facilitate meaningful communication for remote social members. These social members use the SE Ontology but are not involved in the development process. Most existing ontologies including the SE Ontology are designed by individuals or small group of experts, not actual ontology users nor various groups of experts. It is effective if the ontology users can contribute in the process of creating and maintaining the ontologies they use. Social networking is becoming more prevalent enabling people to engage in remote collaboration to form goal-directed social networks. In this paper, we propose a social network based approach for ontology evolution for the SE Ontology. We analyze ontology evolution of the SE Ontology and propose the social network based approach for making ontology evolution more responsive to users' needs.