DEFINING SOFTWARE PROCESS MODEL CONSTRAINTS WITH RULES USING OWL AND SWRL

Abstract

The Software & Systems Process Engineering meta-model (SPEM) allows the modelling of software processes using OMG (Object Management Group) standards such as the MOF (Meta-Object Facility) and UML (Unified Modelling Language) making it possible to represent software processes using tools compliant with UML. Process definition encompasses both the static and dynamic structure of roles, tasks and work products together with imposed constraints on those elements. However, the latter requires support for constraint enforcement that is not always directly available in SPEM. Such constraint-checking behaviour could be used to detect possible mismatches between process definitions and the actual processes being carried out in the course of a project. This paper approaches the modelling of such constraints using the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), which is a W3C recommendation. To do so, we need to first represent generic processes modelled with SPEM using an underlying ontology based on the OWL (Ontology Web Language) representation together with data derived from actual projects.