title: Use of project ontologies and terminology servers to support software engineering.
abstract: Complex medical software imposes new requirements on the methods and tools used for maintenance. Appropriate maintenance tools can increase software reliability and quality by providing means to trace dependencies among software artifacts for reducing unexpected impacts in software caused by software changes. We have used the GRAIL concept-representation language for medical terminologies to build a project ontology that models relationships among software artifacts. Our approach involves modeling of the terminology used in software projects, which enables us to describe, classify and relate individual software artifacts. A networked repository accessible to the entire software development staff stores the conceptual model, source code and associated documents. We present an architecture for a maintenance tool, and show how developers can use GRAIL to build a project ontology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bång
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Eriksson
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Timpka
mesh_terms: D019992:Databases as Topic; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011381:Programming Languages; D012984:Software; D012985:Software Design; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled