Ontology-enabled documentation of service-oriented architectures with ontobrowse semantic wiki

Abstract

Documenting and maintaining an enterprise-wide service-oriented architecture (SOA) causes a substantial management effort, which should be addressed by intelligent, scalable solutions. A particular challenge is that business experts, developers, and software architects take different perspectives on a SOA, each favoring various description formats and sources, which leads towards a scattering of architectural information. Ontobrowse Semantic Wiki specifically addresses these issues by providing an ontology-based integration and documentation platform for architectural information. In this paper, we identify key issues arising from documentation and maintenance of a SOA by introducing the case of an insurance company. We give a detailed description of the Ontobrowse approach and its implementation, and explain how ontologies, artifact mappings, and architectural rules are created to support the Enterprise SOA case.