Ontology-driven visualization of architectural design decisions

There is a gradual increase of interest to use ontologies to capture architectural knowledge, in particular architectural design decisions. While ontologies seem a viable approach to codification, the application of such codified knowledge to everyday practice may be non-trivial. In particular, browsing and searching an architectural knowledge repository for effective reuse can be cumbersome. In this paper, we present how ontology-driven visualization of architectural design decisions can be used to assist software product audits, in which independent auditors perform an assessment of a product's quality. Our visualization combines the simplicity of tabular information representation with the power of on-the-fly ontological inference of decision attributes typically used by auditors. In this way, we are able to support the auditors in effectively reusing their know-how, and to actively assist the core aspects of their decision making process, namely trade-off analysis, impact analysis, and if-then scenarios. We demonstrate our visualization with examples from a real-world application.

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