Social Business - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 126

a variant of the Hawaiian word wicki , which means “fast”), which we've
already mentioned. Wikis are so ubiquitous that the learning curve is
minimal. Quite a few organizations use this tool, specifically IT depart-
ments within the organization. There have been many articles written
about the use of wikis to promote software reuse within the IT depart-
ment. However, wikis have their own attendant problems. Insufficient
usage and decaying structure all need to be addressed if wikis are to be
successful.
The advent of social networking services such as LinkedIn, Facebook,
and MySpace demonstrate the power of social networks and give us an
insight into what could be created specifically for software engineering.
Of course, the current state-of-the-art social networks do have some
limitations, as Ahmadi et al. (2008) thoroughly describe. Chief among
the described problems is the lack of interoperability between social net-
works. The authors suggest leveraging Semantic Web technologies, one of
which is ontologies, as a solution to this problem. An ontology is a formal
representation of specific domain concepts and the relationship between
those concepts. Several ontologies (e.g., www.foaf-project.org, www.sioc-
project.org, www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/11/01/pimo/#)
have become universally recognized, and it is expected that at some point,
interoperability between social networks using ontologies will become
standard practice.
Indeed, some researchers have advocated for the use of ontologies to
improve the discipline of software development itself. Mavetera and
Kroeze (2010) have discussed the different ontology types that can be
used. A domain ontology describes the knowledge to be captured dur-
ing the requirements-analysis phase of software development. Method
ontologies capture the knowledge and reasoning needed to perform a
task. Status ontologies, either dynamic or static, capture the status char-
acteristics of a system. Intentional ontologies model the softer aspects of
living things, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Process ontologies
capture the three aspects of enterprise knowledge, i.e., enterprise knowl-
edge (i.e., processes, organizational structure, IT structure, products,
customers), domain knowledge (i.e., terms, concepts, relationships), and
information knowledge (i.e., document types and structures). Finally,
social ontologies describe the organizational structure and the interde-
pendencies that exist among the social actors (i.e., analyst, tester, devel-
oper, etc.).