Modeling Product Line Variants - Semantic Web Approach

—Variant management is crucial to successful to product line software (SPL) development. Feature diagram is the most widely used notation to model variants of product line. Feature diagram captures both common and variants features of SPL. Various approaches have been proposed to model the variants in a feature model. However, there is a lack of proper formal semantics in most of these approaches. This paper presents our work-in progress feature modeling approach using semantic web, in particular OWL-DL where the features and relations in the feature diagram are represented in a concise and formally sound way. This representation is then checked for variant feature consistency using OWL reasoning tool. Such representation facilitates the search and maintenance of feature models and enhances knowledge sharing and transfer within a reusable engineering context.