A Use Case Diagrams ontology that can be used as common reference for Software Engineering education

In recent years, several studies have shown that ontologies and technologies based on ontologies can be used to bridge the worlds of practice and education. These approaches are considered very important fields of educational technology research. In this paper, we present a domain ontology concerning Use Case Diagrams (UCD) that we developed in an attempt to provide common reference for the creators of training / educational material in a Software Engineering course. For its construction we used an approach that combines certain existing methodologies and includes the collaboration of expert software engineers, who eventually evaluated positively the ontology to cover adequately all aspects of UCD design. The proposed ontology can be used either as part of an experimental e-learning application for the description and management of competencies, learning goals and learning material about the cognitive field of Object-Oriented Analysis, or as a design reference for UCD terms and properties. In this paper we shortly describe our ontology and the methodology we used to create it.