Building up and reasoning about architectural knowledge
International conference on the quality of software architectures, 2006•Springer
Architectural knowledge consists of architecture design as well as the design decisions,
assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is
the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, most of the architectural knowledge
usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. We conjecture that an explicit
representation of architectural knowledge is helpful for building and evolving quality
systems. If we had a repository of architectural knowledge for a system, what would it ideally …
assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is
the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, most of the architectural knowledge
usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. We conjecture that an explicit
representation of architectural knowledge is helpful for building and evolving quality
systems. If we had a repository of architectural knowledge for a system, what would it ideally …
Abstract
Architectural knowledge consists of architecture design as well as the design decisions, assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, most of the architectural knowledge usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. We conjecture that an explicit representation of architectural knowledge is helpful for building and evolving quality systems. If we had a repository of architectural knowledge for a system, what would it ideally contain, how would we build it, and exploit it in practice? In this paper we describe a use-case model for an architectural knowledge base, together with its underlying ontology. We present a small case study in which we model available architectural knowledge in a commercial tool, the Aduna Cluster Map Viewer, which is aimed at ontology-based visualization. Putting together ontologies, use cases and tool support, we are able to reason about which types of architecting tasks can be supported, and how this can be done.
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