ArchVoc--Towards an Ontology for Software Architecture

Knowledge management of any domain requires controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, concept maps and other such artifacts. This paper describes an effort to identify the major concepts in software architecture that can go into such meta knowledge. The concept terms are identified through two different techniques (1) manually, through back-of-the-book index of some of the major texts in Software Architecture (2) through a semi-automatic technique by parsing the Wikipedia pages. Only generic architecture knowledge is considered. Apart from identifying the important concepts of software architecture, we could also see gaps in the software architecture content in the Wikipedia.