Publications

Towards a Common Body of Knowledge for Engineering Secure Software and Services

Abstract

Interdisciplinary communities involve people and knowledge from different disciplines in addressing a common
challenge. Differing perspectives, processes, methods, tools, vocabularies, and standards are problems
that arise in this context. We present an approach to support bringing together disciplines based on a common
body of knowledge (CBK), in which knowledge from different disciplines is collected, integrated, and
structured. The novelty of our approach is twofold: first, it introduces a CBK ontology, which allows one to
semantically enrich contents in order to be able to query the CBK in a more elaborate way afterwards. Second,
it heavily relies on user participation in building up a CBK, making use of the Semantic MediaWiki as a platform
to support collaborative writing. The CBK ontology is backed by a conceptual framework, consisting of
concepts to structure the knowledge, to provide access options to it, and to build up a common terminology. To
ensure a high quality of the provided contents and to sustain the community’s commitment, we further present
organizational means as part of our approach. We demonstrate our work using the example of a Network of
Excellence EU project, which aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from services computing,
security and software engineering.