Software Configuration Management Using Ontologies

Configuration management is an important problem in large software systems. When dealing with hundreds of components, keeping track of version changes and various dependency constraints imposed on the system, throughout its development life cycle is very challenging. Current approaches are ad hoc and proprietary, and there exists no standard for specifying valid software configurations. We propose a novel formalization for configuration management, based on the approaches developed in classic knowledge representation domain. Component constraints and version restrictions are encoded in an ontology using the standard OWL-DL language (a W3C recommendation), which facilitates the sharing of knowledge about configurations, across various systems. Detection and pinpointing of component inconsistencies, by human, is a painstaking and time consuming process. The machine readability of the OWL language enables us to apply reasoning on the specification, and automatically deduce the validity of test configurations. In addition, justifications on the validity of a configuration are provided.