[SE] Feedback ODA note

Hi all,
here's some more feedback for our first note from a colleague of mine.
He recently read the note and wasn't quite happy with it. To be
discussed in the next telco.

Best,
  Daniel




Remarks on the document "Ontology Driven Architectures and Potential
Uses of the Semantic Web in Software Engineering"
(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODA/) as of 2005/06/30
by Hans-Joerg Happel, FZI Karlsruhe.


Overall structure
==========================

While I would guess that a chapter called "Background" would describe
the "background" of "Ontology Driven Architectures and Potential Uses of
the Semantic Web in Software Engineering" this is not really done.
Actually, there is no definition at all of what might be meant by the
"Semantic Web", "semantic technologies" or "Ontologies". Instead, the
whole thread of the chapter circles around software engineering/MDD
ending up with presenting the idea of an "Ontology Driven Architecture".
However, the following chapter, called "Propesed Ideas" begins with a
general discussion of possible relationships between software
engineering and the semantic web.

The examples in chapter 4 differ in structure and level of detail. There
should be a clear three-paragraph structure describing problem, approach
and benefit of the semantic solution (like it is roughly the case for
example A and C). Generally, the amount of text per section varies quite
strongly.


One Possible Alternative Structure
==========================

2 Background
2.1 Software engineering
2.2 Semantic web technologies
2.3 Relations between both fields
  - Current areas of overlap
  - Previous work (e.g. ASE) and possible reasons for a success of
semantic web approaches (e.g. standardization)

3 Proposed Ideas / Roles of semantic web technologies in software
engineering
3.1 Semantic web technologies as primary artifacts
  - "logics layer"
  - rich models (MDA/ODA)
3.2 Semantic web technologies as enablers
  - intelligent infrastructure
  - semantic web itself

4 Example applications
  - An ontology-based Application server
  - Semantic management of Web Services
  - Semantic links among models
  - ...?

5 Outlook


Additional comments
==========================

There is a mismatch between just "Software Engineering" in the
document's title and the term "Systems and Software Engineering" used
throught the paper.

The differentiation between the semantic web as a "classification" and
as a "mechanism" is imho a little bit hard to grasp. I would rather
recommend to differentiate by the "role of semantic technologies in
software engineering", like in the alternative structure presented above.


Typos
==========================

Section 2.1; last paragraph: "reuseable assets" => reusable (applies to
recent version of document)

Section 2.3; 6th paragraph: "have been produced to aid the enineering
and maintenance" => engineering

Section 3.2; Quality paragraph:
  - "categorisatuion and identification" => catogorisation
  - "expresivity through coverage of concpets" => expressivity, concepts

Section 3.4; third paragraph: "At current levels of Web maturity it is
appears" => remove "is"

Received on Tuesday, 11 October 2005 07:34:47 UTC