An expertise-based framework for supporting enterprise applications development

Abstract

Currently, Web mashups are becoming more and more popular for organizations and enterprises with the aim to implement applications based on third party software components. These components may offer sophisticated functionalities and access to high valuable datasources through Web APIs. However, developing a Web mashup may require a rather specialized knowledge about specific Web APIs, their technological features and how to integrate them. If we consider a large organization, knowledge required to implement a mashup can be available, but distributed among different developers that are not easy to identify and assess. To this purpose, we propose a framework and a software tool for searching experts inside the organization that own valuable knowledge about specificWeb APIs and the way to integrate them meaningfully. Retrieved experts are ranked based on: (i) the expertise level on the specific request, and (ii) the social distance with the developer that issued the request. The approach integrates knowledge both internal and external to the organization and represented as a linked data. We include a preliminary evaluation based on an implementation of the framework.