Discovering Shared Services from Cross-Organizational Software Specifications

During a standard software development process, organizations create text-based documents that describe software requirements, design, and implementation. These text-based specifications describe the functionality of future applications as they relate to an existing IT infrastructure. We suggest that these documents also implicitly describe core underlying service-based capabilities of the organization. In this paper, we describe an approach that (when provided with software specifications from multiple organizations) can recommend services shared by the multiple organizations represented. These approaches leverage the syntactic similarity of the specification text and semantic information as inferred from WordNet. Experiments show the effectiveness of this approach when processing real software requirements specifications in operational environments.