Enabling combined software and data engineering at web-scale: The ALIGNED suite of ontologies

Abstract

Effective, collaborative integration of software and big data engineering for Web-scale systems, is now a crucial technical and economic challenge. This requires new combined data and software engineering processes and tools. Semantic metadata standards and linked data principles, provide a technical grounding for such integrated systems given an appropriate model of the domain. In this paper we introduce the ALIGNED suite of ontologies specifically designed to model the information exchange needs of combined software and data engineering. These ontologies are deployed in web-scale, data-intensive, system development environments in both the commercial and academic domains. We exemplify the usage of the suite on a complex collaborative software and data engineering scenario from the legal information system domain.