Towards managing software architectures with ontologies

Abstract

Software architectures are key enabling assets within organizations that develop complex software systems. Among other purposes, software architectures are useful to maintain intellectual control over a software product. We propose a method to continuously check the consistency between a specified architecture model and structural information reverse engineered from the code. We develop criteria that a design language for architectures should fulfill and show that an ontology based description has substantial benefits over the standard modeling languages MOF/UML/OCL. Using ontologies allows the explicit modelling of architectural styles as well as concrete system structures in a single architecture design language. The resulting specifications are modular, compositional and evolvable. Using ontologies we can apply an ontology reasoner to implement consistency checks. Our method integrates previously separate checks such as checking for allowed dependencies and coding style into a single framework and enables more powerful and flexible analyses. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.