Ontology-Oriented Domain Analysis: The Foundation

Abstract

Just as the house building is an endless process, i.e. people build houses one after another without an end, the software development is also an endless process, i.e. people develop software one after another. As it was pointed out by Maymir-Ducharme in[25], “we can no longer treat each new project as a single, new and independent development effort and not build on previous engineering efforts and experience”. Software belonging to the same application domain has lots of similarity. This similarity comes from the expert knowledge of the application domain. Therefore, “instead, we need to view these systems within the context of similar systems built in the past, exploring the commonalties and engineering the appropriate variances”. Better we do not treat the endless software development as a series of separate projects, but treat the application domain as a whole. Then, we can first make a thorough analysis of the domain characteristics and then make reuse of the knowledge and experiences gained from this analysis whenever we are going to develop new software in this domain. People call this idea domain analysis.