Usage of social and semantic web technologies to design a searching architecture for software requirement artefacts

Abstract

At present, the research community recognises a complementary relationship between the semantic and the social web. The merging of these web instances could play an essential role in different knowledge domains. In this study, the authors promote a social-semantic web paradigm using software engineering as the knowledge domain specifically. The authors address a major problem - the difficulty for end-users in finding documentation related to software requirements proposed by them; this fact reduces their participation at the time of specifying the software requirements. Architecture is proposed for enhanced resources search, combining the strengths of the social (social annotations) and semantic (semantic metadata) technologies, which has been designed considering the search style of the information seekers. Such architecture is applied in a use-scenario, where the expert users who are not technicians have some restrictions and limitations to retrieve the documents they need. The preliminary results demonstrate that it is possible to take advantage of the defined infrastructure of the ontology to organise and integrate the metadata of resources which are in databases or existent files; this approach opens several possibilities as creation and validation of software requirements collaboratively among different expert-users. © 2010 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.