A formal ontology for re-use of software architecture documents

Software architecture has been established as a viable level of representation for reuse in practical software engineering efforts. The main reason for this is that an architectural view of software is sufficiently abstract to have many instantiations. Even with technologies such as CORBA and JavaBeans, which emphasize reuse of components, the realization of widespread reuse has been severely limited. While architectural reuse has been successful, it has thus far suffered from an ad-hoc semantics, and even savvy architecture practitioners are unsure precisely what is being reused. We have been engaged in research into reuse of software documents, such as design documents, statements of work, contracts, etc., that capture and reuse architectural level knowledge of software solutions. We have found that, given a sufficiently robust knowledge based tool for maintaining documents, a formal ontology or meta-model for software architectures is required to achieve reuse of these architecture-level documents. We present such an ontology.