Name: FABIANO BORGES RUY
Type: PhD thesis
Publication date: 06/10/2017
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| JOÃO PAULO ANDRADE ALMEIDA | Internal Examiner * |
| MONALESSA PERINI BARCELLOS | Co advisor * |
| VÍTOR ESTÊVÃO SILVA SOUZA | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: "Standards have been used as a way for disseminating best practices in Software Engineering (SE) and other areas. From the side of the standards developers, there is a continuous research effort for capturing, organizing and describing these practices, building the reference models (such as CMMI-DEV, ISO/IEC 12207 and ISO/IEC 29110). From the users side (such as software organizations), they can take advantage of acknowledged practices for improving their software processes aiming at benefits related to quality products, productivity and lower costs. In both cases, it is often necessary to deal with multiple standards in combination for providing more aligned reference models or for deploying practices from different sources. However, most of these standards are created independently, defining their own scope, structure and terminology, often not sharing the same semantics. This frequently gives rise to inconsistencies and divergences between them. This issue is amplified by the application of multiple standards in combination, causing semantic interoperability problems.
Researchers and standardization organizations, such as ISO, have been attempting diverse approaches for comparing, mapping, integrating and harmonizing related standards along the last two decades. We believe that, as a semantic problem, it demands a semantic-oriented solution, and that ontologies are a key-enabling technology for that. Hence, for addressing the problem of harmonizing software process standards, we have developed a Software Engineering Ontology Network (SEON) and an ontology-based standards harmonization approach (Harmony).
SEON is built on a foundational ontology, holds the SE core notions aligned to general SE standards, and is organized in a reusable pattern-oriented fashion. It comprises a set of domain networked ontologies providing the domain knowledge to be used in integration and harmonization initiatives. Harmony describes an ontology-driven process for conducting standards harmonization efforts. It explores the use of conceptual models and harmonization techniques sustained by SEON and a mapping tool. Semantic aspects are encouraged to be explored along this process. Finally, some evaluations have been conducted for assessing and improving both the approach and the network."
