Helping Architects In Retrieving Architecture Documents: A Semantic Based Approach

Abstract. Large organizations have a need and challenge of archiving the architecture work done on software projects. Knowledge management in such organizations depends on how well the company preserves the knowledge acquired on completed projects and how well the company provides facilities to retrieve that architectural knowledge. Architecture properties such as styles, patterns, tactics and quality requirements play a major role while architecting the systems. Annotating the documents with such properties helps the architect in searching for architecture documents at a later date. There exist a large number of relationships between these architecture properties. A huge knowledge base is required to know about the best practices and the existing relationships between them. In this paper, we present an ontology for these architecture properties. We describe how this ontology can be used in various applications like semantic based search, academic purpose and building of new systems using the best practices