Continuous Architectural Knowledge Integration: Making Heterogeneous Architectural Knowledge Available in Large-Scale Organizations

Abstract

The timely discovery, sharing and integration of architectural knowledge (AK) have become critical aspects in enabling the software architects to make meaningful conceptual and technical design decisions and trade-offs. In large-scale organizations particular obstacles in making AK available to architects are a heterogeneous pool of internal and external knowledge sources, poor interoperability between AK management tools and limited support of computational AK reasoning. Therefore we introduce the Continuous Architectural Knowledge Integration (CAKI) approach that combines the continuous integration of internal and external AK sources together with enhanced semantic reasoning and personalization capabilities dedicated to large organizations. Preliminary evaluation results show that CAKI potentially reduces AK search effort by concurrently yielding more diverse and relevant results.