Ontologies of Software Artifacts and Activities: Resource Annotation and Application to Learning Technologies

The emerging consensus on the boundaries and main elements of the Software Engineering (SE) discipline represents an opportunity for the engineering of shared conceptualizations that may serve both to design automated tools and tasks that help in diverse phases and aspects of the software process, and also to annotate learning–oriented resources. Formal ontologies provide an appropriate logics– based framework for such conceptual models. This paper describes the main ontological commitments that underlie the Onto-SWEBOK project, focusing on how SE artifacts and activities can be represented. The paper also discusses how semantic annotations can be provided for learning resources oriented to the initial and continuing education on the discipline, which enables the reuse of such resources in diverse learning designs.