Enabling combined software and data engineering: The ALIGNED suite of ontologies

Effective, collaborative integration of software and big data engineering for Web-scale systems, is now a crucial technical and economic challenge. This requires new combined data and software engineering processes and tools. Semantic metadata standards and linked data principles, provide a technical grounding for such integrated systems given an appropriate model of the domain. In this paper we introduce the ALIGNED suite of ontologies specifically designed to model the information exchange needs of combined software and data engineering. The models have been deployed to enable: tool-chain integration, such as the exchange of data quality reports; cross-domain communication, such as interlinked data and software unit testing; mediation of the system design process through the capture of design intents and as a source of context for model-driven software engineering processes. These ontologies are deployed in web-scale, data-intensive, system development environments in both the commercial and academic domains. We exemplify the usage of the suite on a complex collaborative software and data engineering scenario from the legal information system domain.