Towards a knowledge driven framework for bridging the gap between software and data engineering

Abstract

In this paper we present a collection of ontologies specifically designed to model the information exchange needs of combined software and data engineering. Effective, collaborative integration of software and big data engineering for Web-scale systems, is now a crucial technical and economic challenge. This requires new combined data and software engineering processes and tools. Our proposed models have been deployed to enable: tool-chain integration, such as the exchange of data quality reports; cross-domain communication, such as interlinked data and software unit testing; mediation of the system design process through the capture of design intents and as a source of context for model-driven software engineering processes. These ontologies are deployed in webscale, data-intensive, system development environments in both the commercial and academic domains. We exemplify the usage of the suite on case-studies emerging from two complex collaborative software and data engineering scenarios: one from the legal sector and the other from the Social sciences and Humanities domain.