An Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System for Active Software Engineering Ontology

Abstract

The ongoing trend towards multi-site software development not only brings the benefits but also creates additional challenges regarding remote communication and coordination. The Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) was first developed to clarify the software engineering concepts and project information, and to enable knowledge sharing among dispersed teams. However, the current SE Ontology has the same passive structure as other ontologies that exist on the Web. Passive structure refers to a need to know exactly the concepts and relationships to which users are referring in the ontology. Otherwise, he/she may not be able to obtain the knowledge required. What is needed is active support that can help users find the information they need and provide them with meaningful output. In this paper, we propose an active Software Engineering Ontology through Multi-Agent System (SEOMAS) framework which is intended to provide active support to access software engineering domain knowledge and to recommend software project information captured in the SE Ontology. The UML and Agent UML are used to formalise the SEOMAS framework and to model interactions between the various agents. The prototype is developed and evaluated using several scenarios of the online shopping system development as a case study.