An Ontology for Service-Oriented Dynamic Software Product Lines Knowledge Management

Service oriented dynamic software product line (SO-DSPL) engineering provides a development paradigm for building configurable service-oriented applications and adapting them at runtime according to their context. To support context-aware and runtime adaptation of services, SO-DSPLs consider various aspects of knowledge, such as users' contexts, product lines properties, services description and QoS. In fact, the knowledge variety produces variability that must be taken into account. Thus, wealth and diversity of this knowledge require an efficient knowledge management (KM) tool to ensure knowledge-based SO-DSPL engineering. The main challenge is to overcome the lack of a multi-dimensional and unified conceptualization of knowledge. Practically, most of existing knowledge representations consider particular dimensions that depend on specific product lines, ignore the semantic between them and do not handle knowledge variability. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper an ontology for SO-DSPL knowledge management that establishes a common conceptualization about SO-DSPLs dimensions and provides a unified and sharable knowledge base. This ontology can serve several SO-DSPL activities and KM-related purposes. such as defining a common vocabulary for knowledge workers with respect to the SO-DSPL domain, structuring SO-DSPL knowledge repositories, and providing a knowledge base to configure and recommend services to be used for the building and dynamic adaptation of configurable service-oriented applications. In this paper. we present the ontology dimensions by means of sub-ontologies in order to promote their reuse.