Knowledge-based interaction in software development

Modern software development is highly knowledge intensive; it requires that software developers create and share new knowledge during their daily work. However, current software development environments are “syntactic”, i.e. they do not facilitate understanding the semantics of software artefacts and hence cannot fully support the knowledge-driven activities of developers. In this paper we present KnowBench, a knowledge workbench environment which focuses on the software development domain and strives to address these problems. KnowBench aims at providing an intelligent, semantic user interface environment for software developers. Such a tool aims to ease their daily work and facilitate the articulation and visualization of software artefacts, while also support concept-based source code documentation and related problem solving. Building a knowledge base with software artefacts by using the KnowBench system can then be exploited by semantic search engines or P2P metadata infrastructures in order to foster the dissemination of software development knowledge and facilitate cooperation among software developers.