Ontologies of engineering knowledge: general structure and the case of Software Engineering

Abstract

Engineering knowledge is a specific kind of knowledge that is oriented to the production of particular classes of artifacts, is typically related to disciplined design methods, and takes place in tool-intensive contexts. As a consequence, representing engineering knowledge requires the elaboration of complex models that combine functional and structural representations of the resulting artifacts with process and methodological knowledge. The different categories used in the engineering domain vary in their status and in the way they should be manipulated when building applications that support engineering processes. These categories include artifacts, activities, methods and models. This paper surveys existing models of engineering knowledge and discusses an upper ontology that abstracts the categories that crosscut different engineering domains. Such an upper model can be reused for particular engineering disciplines. The process of creating such elaborations is reported on the particular case study of Software Engineering as a concrete application example.

Software Engineering Risks from Technical Debt in the Representation of Product/ion Knowledge

“…Engineering knowledge is a specific kind of knowledge, oriented towards the production of artifacts, and, as such, requires knowledge modeling and representation approaches that differ from other types of knowledge, such as taxonomical knowledge characteristic for the life sciences domain [25]. Ontologies are information artefacts that have been used extensively to explicitly represent such engineering knowledge.…”

Exploiting the Semantic Web to Represent Information from On-line Collaborative Learning

“…However, the social processes happening behind real collaborative learning practices are very complex and subjective, and thus they fall far from a holistic view proposed by standards and ontologies. 10 automatically analyze the interactions taken into account by users within collaboration. The idea is to learn the relationship between a set of contributions types and the perceived intention of their authors and improve the ontology information with such information.…”

Formal modelling, knowledge representation and reasoning for design and development of user-centric pervasive software: a meta-review

“…Ontologies can be used for diverse engineering purposes such as for formalising engineering activities (Sicilia et al, 2009) and artefacts. Our focus is on software as an engineering artefact.…”

“…The overall approach is based on the understanding that ontologies are boarder than models in terms of semantics and the reality they describe (Fonseca and Martin, 2007), and ontologies are always backward looking (i.e., descriptive: describe what already exists) that in a real world is described with the concepts of the ontology, while models are mainly forward looking (i.e., prescriptive: prescribe a system that does not exist, and reality is constructed from it), that is, objects of a system's elements are instances of the model elements (Gonzalez-Perez and Sellers, 2007;Henderson-Sellers, 2011). Ontologies are primarily used to describe domains (Sicilia et al, 2009) while models are used to prescribe systems (Assmann et al, 2006a). Although there is an ongoing discussion on distinguishing between models, meta-models and ontologies (in the literature, several authors directly investigate comparisons of ontologies and meta-models as well as comparisons of ontologies and models (Henderson-Sellers, 2011)) from a philosophical perspective, since at this stage we are more interested in practical issues we refer interested readers to Assmann et al (2006a), Devedzic (2002), Gonzalez-Perez and Sellers (2007) and Henderson-Sellers (2011).…”