Applications of ontologies in collaborative software development

Making distributed teams more efficient is one main goal of Collaborative Software Development (CSD) research. To this end, ontologies, which are models that capture a shared understanding of a specific domain, provide key benefits. Ontologies have formal, machine-interpretable semantics that allow to define semantic mappings for heterogeneous data and to infer implicit knowledge at run-time. Extending development infrastructures and software architectures with ontologies (of problem and solution domains) will address coordination and knowledge sharing challenges in activities such as documentation, requirements specificationrequirements specification, component reuse, error handling, and test case management. The purpose of this article is to provide systematic account of how ontologies can be applied in CSD, and to describe benefits of both existing applications such as "semantic wikis" as well as visionary scenarios such as a "Software Engineering Semantic Web".