Towards Ontology-Based Software Engineering for Multiperspective Software Development

Multiperspective software development inevitably involves with a group of stakeholders in order to construct different parts of an application system. However, various developers need to interoperate or collaborate by integrating, merging, verifying and tracing their artifacts in order to achieve a common goal of their development. In this situation, ontology can play an essential role in communication among diverse developers in the course of an integrating system. More specifically, ontology is used as a knowledge management mechanism in order to define an explicit account of a shared understanding among various developers for interoperability and knowledge interchange purposes. The main objective of this paper is to propose an ontology based software engineering (OBSE) approach for integrating or merging the ontologies in the multiperspective software development process. The OBSE approach is used to support a truly distributed, collaborative and multiperspective software development environment. This paper presents the state of the art ontological engineering and the ontologies in the software engineering process. The viewpoints of OBSE are also outlined.