Merging Software Maintenance Ontologies: Our Experience

Ontologies capture consensual knowledge of a specific domain in a generic and formal way, to allow reusing and sharing it among groups of people. However, there is not a unique possible ontology to model for a particular domain. For example, in the case of the software maintenance domain there are several published ontologies (Kitchenham et al., 2001), (Deridder, 2002), (Dias et al., 2003), (Ruiz et al., 2004), each one dealing with the maintenance process with a different focus. After reviewing the different ontologies defined for maintenance we decided to merge two ontologies that seemed to be complementary, these are the ontology described in (Dias et al., 2003) which identifies what knowledge is needed during maintenance process and the ontology proposed by Ruiz et al. (2004) focused on the management of software maintenance projects. As both ontologies are based on Kitchenham’s work (1999) and have a very similar objective, we believed that merging them would be a relatively easy task. In the next section we describe our experience trying to do so. Finally, conclusions are outlined.