Adding semantics to social software engineering: (Re-)using ontologies in a community-oriented requirements engineering environment

Abstract

Social Software is typically characterized by low formal semantics and weakly structured contents. Software Engineering, in contrast, requires at least a certain degree of formality and structure. In order to face these opposing demands, we propose to ground Social Software Engineering on concepts and technologies from the Semantic Web. In particular, we present a Semantic Wiki based approach in this paper that uses well-known ontologies to represent activities and artifacts that emerge in an online environment for community-oriented Requirements Engineering. We illustrate the benefits of reusing these domain-independent ontologies and show how they can fruitfully be combined and interlinked in one common upper ontology.