A Usability Evaluation of the NESSoS Common Body of Knowledge

The common body of knowledge (CBK) of the Network of Excellence on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems (NESSoS) is a ontology that contains knowledge objects (methods, tools, notations, etc.) for secure systems engineering. The CBK is intended to support one of the main goals of the NESSoS NoE, namely to create a long-lasting research community on engineering secure software services and systems and to bring together researchers and practitioners from security engineering, service computing, and software engineering. Hence, the usability of the CBK is of utmost importance to stimulate participations in the effort of collecting and distributing knowledge about secure systems engineering. This paper is devoted to identifying and ameliorating usability deficiencies in the initial version of the CBK and its current implementation in the SMW+ framework. We report on usability tests that we performed on the initial version of the CBK and the suggestions for improvement that resulted from the usability tests. We also show some exemplary solutions, which we already implemented. We discuss our experiences so that other researchers can benefit from them.