Employing Linked Data in Building a Trace Links Taxonomy

Software traceability provides a means for capturing the relationship between artifacts at all phases of software and systems development. The relationships between the artifacts that are generated during systems development can provide valuable information for software and systems Engineers. It can be used for change impact analysis, systems verification and validation, among other things. However, there is no consensus among researchers about the syntax or semantics of trace links across multiple domains. Moreover, existing trace links classifications do not consider a unified method for combining all trace links types in one taxonomy that can be utilized in Requirement Engineering, Model Driven Engineering and Systems Engineering. This paper is one step towards solving this issue. We first present requirements that a trace links taxonomy should satisfy. Second, we present a technique to build a trace links taxonomy that has well-defined semantics. We implemented the taxonomy by employing the Link data and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The taxonomy can be configured with traceability models using Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) in order to capture traceability information among different artifacts and at different levels of granularity. In addition, the taxonomy offers reasoning and quantitative and qualitative analysis about trace links. We presented validation criteria for validating the taxonomy requirements and validate the solution through an example.