The Evaluation of ontological representations of the SWEBOK as a revision tool

The SWEBOK represents an important milestone in reaching a broad agreement on the contents of the Software Engineering discipline. Formal ontologies thus become a tool to represent such agreement in a logicsbased framework for a number of applications. In this paper, the use of common ontological criteria in the <Onto-SWEBOK> project is described as a useful assessment tool. The use of such concepts and a disciplined approach to representing terms and relations has resulted in a tentative structured revision procedure for SWEBOK material that could be used as a technique for improving or restructuring definitions. The main elements of the technique are described, along with illustrative examples of its potential application as a revision tool.