Ontobrowse: A semantic wiki for sharing knowledge about software architectures

The development and maintenance of a software architecture involves various stakeholders with different interests. While developers primarily require technical support and guidance for their implementation tasks, architects need means for analysis and documentation. We argue that most approaches and tools insufficiently support the requirements of both groups appropriately, leading to a scattering of architectural information into different information spaces. To resolve this problem we propose Ontobrowse - A lightweight solution which is based upon ontologies and the recent paradigm of semantic wikis. Ontobrowse allows the combination of informal with more formal documentation together with the integration of asserted knowledge from external specification resources. The system architecture and prototypical implementation are described. To illustrate the benefits of our approach, we introduce the case of documenting service-oriented architectures in an enterprise setting.