An Ontological Process Model for Software Maintenance and Comprehension

Software maintenance involves the integration, abstraction and analysis of different knowledge resources and artifacts. Maintainers are typically left with no guidance on how to utilize these resources to complete a particular maintenance task. In this research, we present a novel approach that integrates relevant maintenance resources and an existing software maintenance process through a formal unified ontological model. Reasoning and query services are applied to this ontological representation to establish traceability between resources and the process model and to provide maintainers with context sensitive guidance.