Collaborative engineering software development: Ontology-based approach

This paper proposes an ontology-based approach to facilitate collaboration between domain experts and software engineers for development of engineering software applications. In this approach, ontologies are employed to serve as the knowledge interfaces for encapsulating the analysis units identified from the solution workflow of the targeted problem domain and for reducing the collaboration complexity and knowledge coupling between domain problem solving and software engineering in software development. In this paper, the proposed ontology-based software development approach is discussed. Some considerations are given to the software development environment needed for realization of the proposed approach. In addition, the application of the proposed approach is demonstrated using an engineering software development example and a prototype ontology-based software development environment.