A Process Model for Developing Semantic Web Systems

Before the Web era various software development methodologies have been proposed for the development of software applications for different domains. The main objectives of those methodologies were to meet user’s requirements, find out means to suggest a systematic software development and reduce the maintenance cost of the developed software. On the emergence of the Web and to develop the web-based software systems, some existing methodologies have been extended. Also, new approaches (or informal methodologies) are introduced for the development of web-based systems because the development process for these systems is not considered as an extension of the classical software engineering, although both development processes for web-based systems and non web-based systems have the same basic objective which is software development. Of course, the development of the web-based systems needs a new kind of development methodologies which should meet and capture their unique and different requirements. Currently available software development methodologies are inappropriate and unsuitable to use for the development of web-based software systems, especially for the third generation web, called Semantic Web. In this paper, we present a brief review of the existing software development methodologies for the development of web-based systems. Some informal software development methodologies (or approaches) for the semantic web are also reviewed. Then, based on this analytical review, we propose a model for the development of semantic web systems. This model can be used as a benchmark to propose formal methodologies for the development of the semantic web systems. [New York Science Journal 2010;3(9):34-39]. (ISSN: 1554-0200).