Using Semantic Documentation to Support Software Project Management

Project management is a key process for software projects. Nowadays, there are several tools that support project management activities. However, the existence of such tools did not eliminate the use of documents for documenting the outcomes of the project management process. Text documents and spreadsheets are used to support communication between stakeholders and understanding about the project. These documents are generally developed to be understood by humans and not by computers. Thus, the access to the document content typically depends on human intervention. Retrieving information from documents can be not trivial, especially when it is distributed in several documents. A semantic documentation approach can be used to deal with this issue. Combining ontologies and documents by adding semantic annotations to documents makes the document content interpretable by computers and can help diminish the burden of gathering information later on. In this paper, we present a semantic documentation approach for supporting software project management, providing a way to get useful information from data recorded in documents and spreadsheets related to scope, time and cost management. For this, we developed the first version of a Software Project Management Ontology, which is integrated into the Software Engineering Ontology Network. This ontology is used to annotate documents and spreadsheets and to develop features to support scope, time and cost management activities. These features were implemented in the Infrastructure for Managing Semantic Documents in Software Project Management, which was evaluated through an experimental study.