Towards an ontology pattern language for harmonizing software process related ISO standards

Many efforts have been made for modeling and standardizing software processes. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7, the ISO sub-committee responsible for software and systems engineering, is one of the most important groups devoted to this task. However, standards developed by this committee are frequently inconsistent and even contradictory. This led to the need for an ISO Study Group to investigate the creation of an ontological infrastructure to establish a common conceptualization for underpinning all SC7 standards. This ISO initiative is a work in progress, which has focused on the software process domain and, in particular, considering the ISO/IEC 24744 standard. In this paper, we advocate in favor of using an Ontology Pattern Language (OPL) as the main component of this ontological infrastructure. We present ISP-OPL (ISO-based Software Process OPL), an OPL that can be applied as a basis for harmonizing software process-related standards, favoring reuse when building aligned specific software process ontologies for SE sub-domains. In order to illustrate its application, we also present an ontology about the Requirements Engineering process, developed by using ISP-OPL.