Building process definition with ontology background

Documented software processes and their assessments are the basics of modern software development. Currently the semantic web, knowledge bases and knowledge management have many applications. Yet, applications to support software processes (and business processes in general) are rather neglected. In this paper we focus on applying a knowledge layer into software processes and on the design of such a knowledge base. After a brief description of some classical fundamental approaches to software processes and knowledge bases, we propose an improvement based on the application of a machine readable knowledge base. In particular, we aim at optimizing and improving software process development using knowledge bases created with the aim to formally describe software process development.