Abstract :
Social networks are having a huge impact on how people socialise, gather information, stay informed and solve problems. As could be expected, this trend is influencing the area of software engineering at different levels. In software development, the amount of data available is becoming prohibitively overwhelming for analysis purposes with traditional techniques. As semantic technologies mature, they provide a consistent and reliable basis to handle large amounts of data. Besides, they enable added value, reasoning-based functionality to access such data in an automatic fashion. The authors present a system for supporting the design of teams for software development projects, which combines the benefits of semantics and social networks. The authors also propose a full-fledged solution backed with a proof-of-concept implementation that has been tested in the scope of small and medium enterprises (SME).