Using Ontologies For Software Documentation

High quality software documentation is a substantial issue to understand software systems. Shorter time-to-market software cycles increase the importance of automatism to keep the documentation up to date. In this paper, we describe the automatic support of the software documentation process using a social semantic software approach. Therefore, we introduce a software documentation ontology as underlying knowledge base. The defined ontology is populated automatically through analyzing source code, documentation and code executions and made accessible to developers via a wiki. The wiki enforces collaboration and allows correcting analysis errors. We demonstrate, that the use of social semantic systems can support software documentation processes efficiently.