Monalessa Perini Barcellos

Organizing Ontology Design Patterns as Ontology Pattern Languages

Ontology design patterns have been pointed out as a promising ap- proach for ontology engineering. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, based on well-established works in Software Engineering, we revisit the notion of ontology patterns in Ontology Engineering to introduce the notion of ontolo- gy pattern language as a way to organize related ontology patterns. Secondly, we present an overview of a software process ontology pattern language.

Towards an enterprise ontology pattern language

Enterprise ontologies are useful for many purposes. Over the years, there have been a number of efforts aiming at building them. However, due to the complexity of the enterprise domain, enterprise ontologies tend to be complex and difficult to reuse. In this paper, we advocate in favor of organizing Core Enterprise Ontologies as Ontology Pattern Languages, since ontology patterns are more and more recognized as an approach that favors ontology reuse. Moreover, we present an initial version of the Enterprise Ontology Pattern Language (E-OPL), and show how it was used for building an enterprise ontology for a specific domain.

Using a Foundational Ontology for Reengineering a Software Enterprise Ontology

The knowledge about software organizations is considerably relevant to software engineers. The use of a common vocabulary for representing the useful knowledge about software organizations involved in software projects is important for several reasons, such as to support knowledge reuse and to allow communication and interoperability between tools. Domain ontologies can be used to define a common vocabulary for sharing and reuse of knowledge about some domain. Foundational ontologies can be used for evaluating and re-designing domain ontologies, giving to these real-world semantics. This paper presents an evaluating of a Software Enterprise Ontology that was reengineered using the Unified Foundation Ontology (UFO) as basis.

An ontology pattern language for service modeling

The notion of service spans several domains, such as healthcare, education, and information and communication technology (ICT). In this context, service ontologies are very useful for establishing a common understanding of the main concepts and relations involved, as well as for serving as basis for modeling services in different domains. In this paper, we present an Ontology Pattern Language, called S-OPL, providing a network of interconnected ontology modeling patterns covering the core conceptualization of services. S-OPL builds on UFO-S, a commitment-based core ontology for services. S-OPL patterns support modeling types of customers and providers, as well as the main service life-cycle phases, namely: service offering, service negotiation/agreement, and service delivery. The use of S-OPL is demonstrated in a real case in the ICT service domain.

A strategy for preparing software organizations for statistical process control

Software organizations have increased their interest in software process improvement (SPI). Nowadays, there are several frameworks that support SPI implementation. Some of them, such as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), propose to implement SPI in levels. At high maturity levels, such as CMMI levels 4 and 5, SPI involves carrying out statistical process control (SPC), which requires measures and data suitable for this context. However, measurement problems have been pointed in the literature as one of the main obstacles for a successful implementation of SPC in SPI efforts. With this scenario in mind, we developed a strategy to help software organizations prepare themselves regarding measurement aspects in order to implement SPC. The strategy is made up of three components: a Reference Software Measurement Ontology, an Instrument for Evaluating the Suitability of a Measurement Repository for SPC, and a Body of Recommendations for Software Measurement Suitable for SPC. In this paper we present the strategy as a whole and describe each one of its components.

Establishing a Well-Founded Conceptualization about Software Measurement in High Maturity Levels

Software measurement is a key process for software process improvement. Measurement provides organizations with the objective information they need to make informed decisions that impact their business performance. Nowadays, there are several process quality models and standards that point out the importance of software measurement, such as CMMI. Unfortunately, the vocabulary used by those models concerning software measurement is diverse. This leads to misunderstanding and problems related to the jointly use of different standards. In this paper, we present a fragment of a Software Measurement Ontology (SMO) with focus on measurement at high maturity levels. In order to establish a basic conceptualization regarding this domain, the Unified Foundational Ontology was used to ground SMO.

An ISO-based software process ontology pattern language and its application for harmonizing standards

Many efforts have been made for modeling and standardizing software processes. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7, the ISO sub-committee responsible for software and systems engineering, is one of the most important groups devoted to this task. However, standards developed by this committee are frequently inconsistent and even contradictory. This led to the need for an ISO Study Group to investigate the creation of an ontological infrastructure to establish a common conceptualization for underpinning all SC7 standards. This ISO initiative is a work in progress, which has focused on the software process domain and, in particular, considering the ISO/IEC 24744 standard. In this paper, we advocate in favor of using an Ontology Pattern Language (OPL) as the main component of this ontological infrastructure. We present ISP-OPL (ISO-based Software Process OPL), an OPL that can be applied as a basis for harmonizing software process-related ISO standards, favoring reuse when building aligned specific software process ontologies for Software Engineering sub-domains. In order to evaluate its applicability, we conducted an experiment involving seven domain ontologies, developed using ISP-OPL.

A Well-Founded Software Process Behavior Ontology to Support Business Goals Monitoring in High Maturity Software Organizations

Organizations define strategies and establish business goals aiming to be competitive. The process performance analysis supports goals monitoring, allowing to detect and to treat threats to goals achievement. In this context, measurement is essential. The collected data for measures are used to analyze the process performance and to guide informed decisions that lead to the achievement of business and technical goals. For software organizations, the process performance analysis is a high maturity practice. In this context, although there are several standards that address the importance of software measurement and its use in process performance analysis, the vocabulary used by these standards concerning software measurement is diverse. In order to establish a conceptualization regarding this domain, we developed a Software Measurement Ontology (SMO), grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology. In this paper, we present a fragment of SMO with focus on software process behavior analysis.

Strategic Alignment between Academy and Industry: A Virtuous Cycle to Promote Innovation in Technology

Knowledge arises from the observation of problems. In this sense, Software Engineering emerged from the necessity to solve a practical problem: the lack of knowledge on how to develop software properly. However, in the Software Engineering field the interaction between Academy and Industry is still weak. This weakness reduces the capability to promote, in the long term, technology innovation in a comprehensive and sustainable manner. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to allow the strategic alignment between Software Engineering research interests and the software industry challenges. This mechanism will be used to achieve continuous innovation in Software Engineering. Furthermore, we expect to create a virtuous cycle in which both Academy and Industry act together to approximate the state-of-art and the state-of-practice in order to maximize their results.

Metrics to Support IT Service Maturity Models

Background: Maturity models for IT service such as CMMI-SVC and MR-MPS-SV requires identification of critical business process and definition of relevant metrics to support decision-making, but there is no clear direction or strict suggestion about which should be those processes and metrics. Aims: We aim to identify adequate metrics to be used by organizations deploying IT service maturity models and the relationship between those metrics and processes of IT service maturity models or standards. Research questions are: (i) Which metrics are being suggested for IT service quality improvement projects? (ii) How do they relate to IT service maturity models processes? Method: We have defined and executed a systematic mapping review protocol. A specialist on systematic mapping review and IT service maturity models evaluated the protocol and its results. Results: Of 114 relevant studies, 13 addressed the research questions. All of them presented quality metrics, but none presented tools or techniques for metrics identification. Conclusions: We identified 133 metrics, 80 related to specific processes areas of service maturity models. Even being a broad result, not all models aspects were considered in this study.