Toward a Software Maintenance Methodology using Semantic Web Techniques

This paper describes ongoing research to develop a methodology for software maintenance using semantic Web techniques. We propose the collection of software system metadata which may include functional and nonfunctional requirements documentation, metrics, the success or failure of tests and the means by which various components interact or were intended to interact. We attempt to record and track changes to the metadata and use it to proactively notify developers of changing requirements and quality measurements which may impact farther development. This research uses semantic Web techniques such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL to encode system metadata and discusses the particular advantages that these techniques offer over other proposals. Specifically, we show how the use of an OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts, RDF encoding of system metadata and SPARQL queries over the resulting RDF graph can be used to enable language-neutral relational navigation of software systems thus facilitating software understanding and maintenance. Proposed extensions to this research are outlined, including the development of a toolset for distributed software maintenance