Guidelines for the Specification and Design of Large-Scale Semantic Applications

This paper presents a set of guidelines to help software engineers with the specification and design of large-scale semantic applications by defining new processes for Requirements Engineering and Design for semantic applications. To facilitate its use to software engineers not experts in semantic technologies, several techniques are provided, namely, a characterization of large-scale semantic applications, common use cases that appear when developing this type of application, and a set of architectural patterns that can be used for modelling the architecture of semantic applications. The paper also presents an example of how these guidelines can be used and an evaluation of our contributions using the W3C Semantic Web use cases.