deutsche Version

Motivation

Software development nowadays faces the following challenges and problems:

• There is often a very large number of spatially distributed stakeholders.
• Software Specification and Development is usually distributed and involves different partners.
• A large number of end users should be integrated in feedback-loops.
• There are no known adequate methods for parallel engineering of platforms and applications using these platforms.
• Applications are usually centralised for service or socially oriented systems (e.g. E-Government).

Goal

The aim of the SoftWiki project is to enable large distributed groups of stakeholders to

• collaboratively specificy, structure, query and rearrange requirements,
• enhanced with terminologically and semantically structured annotations,
• with maximum efficiency,
• in a human and machine readable way.

Solution Architecture

The target solution architecture is shown by this picture:

Roles within the Consortium

The SoftWiki project consortium consists of university partners (Leipzig, Duisburg and Essen), integrated end-user industry partners (T-Systems and Lecos) and industry specialists in requirements engineering and text analysis (QA Systems, Pro DV and ISA). The different roles of these partners is shown by the next picture:

Social Requirements Engineering

We realize Social Requirements Engineering as an special scenario of agile and distributed Knowledge Engineering. To support these special type of Knowledge Engineering, we develop a tool which is based on paradigm of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. These are:

• a knowledge base used as an information map, with different views on instance data
• intuitive wiki-like authoring of semantic content
• social collaboration
  • keep track of changes
  • allowing to comment and discuss every single part of a requirements engineering knowledge base)
  • enable users to rate and measure the popularity of content
  • honoring the activity of users
• semantic enhanced search strategies

All these techniques are applied with the ultimate goal of decreasing the entrance barrier for projects and requirements engineering experts to collaborate using semantic technologies. In the spirit of the Web 2.0 we implement an ”architecture of participation” that allows users to add value to the application as they use it.