· · · Institutional Repository

The Web is radically changing the ways in which we can collectively compile, curate, filter and make sense of information. This holds promise for embracing complexity and truly informed decisions for sustainability in a connected world. In this book, Chris Davis reveals that there exists tremendous untapped potential of the Web, of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. He argues that more researchers need to become aware of and engaged with the new tools and possibilities the Web offers. He analyses how tools such as Wikis, the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data already facilitate some scientific communities. Thus, he explores our relationship with data and the philosophies behind the Web. Addressing the challenge of how to collect and liberate data for research on large-scale energy and industry systems, he extracts design requirements for an evolving knowledge infrastructure. These are used to create Enipedia.tudelft.nl, a Semantic Wiki for energy and industry data. This site already serves a growing community of researchers and professionals around the world in their analysis and modeling work. Read this thesis to understand how to get started with the Web technologies that are already changing the nature of research work.

Software architecture plays an important part in program comprehension, which is one of the most time consuming tasks in software development. If software developers don’t properly share their architectural knowledge with team members, the team will act based on an incomplete or even possibly incorrect view on the code base, and this can lead to architectural degradation. Recently there has been a surge of collaboration, communication and sharing with the advent of Web 2.0 applications. In this thesis we have investigated how Web 2.0 can be used to support software architecture management. In particular in the area of architecture documentation, architecture retrieval, and collaboration. We created an approach which applies Web 2.0 concepts such as traceability, integration, usability, navigability, and user experience, to software architecture management. This approach is supported by a prototype tool called ArchWiki, which has features such as traceability between different artifacts (e.g. source code, architectural diagrams, architectural documentation), context-sensitive views, hyperlinks, notifications, tags, and bookmarks. We performed an initial evaluation study to assess ArchWiki. In this study we found that Web 2.0 has the potential to support software architecture knowledge management.