Exploring ontologies to support the establishment of reference architectures: An example on software testing

Software architectures have played a significant role in determining the success of software systems. In particular, reference architectures have emerged, achieving well-recognized understanding in a specific domain, promoting reuse of design expertise and facilitating the development of systems. In another perspective, ontologies have been widely investigated aiming at representing, communicating and reusing knowledge. In spite of their relevance on directly dealing with domain knowledge, reference architectures and ontologies have been separately treated. In this paper we investigate the impact in using ontologies to the establishment of reference architectures. We illustrate our idea using an ontology of software testing to build a reference architecture for the testing domain. Preliminary results indicate that ontologies are an important and viable mechanism aiming at building reference architectures.