Domain Ontologies and the Conversion of Tacit Knowledge in Software Development

Euler Evangelista, Cristiana De Mu˙lder

This study presents a proposal to build and analyze a domain ontology as a tool to support the knowledge transfer process in the context of software requirements analysis in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. The proposal is to use ontologies as an engineering artifact with the objective of representing knowledge in a specific domain, which, in the context of this research, is software modeling. A domain ontology is built to represent the requirements of a data warehouse/business intelligence software in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. The ontology-building process is supported by a specific methodology, defined with the purpose of building such artifacts, named “Methondology,” and selected based on the research requirements. A prototype is created in the implementation phase of the ontology-building process. The results demonstrate that ontology domains can contribute to the process of analyzing and representing software requirements, as well as serving as a tool for organizational knowledge transfer through continuous knowledge conversion, which is critical for business sustainability. This study is an attempt to understand the knowledge conversion process in software development projects. Tacit knowledge is complex to articulate through formal language once it has been embedded with individual experience.

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