Software Architectures and the Use of Knowledge Graphs to Support Their Design

Software architecture is concerned with identifying the essential components of a software system and the process of creating an abstract representation of the system. A representation encompasses software elements, their properties and relationships with other elements. Similar to the architecture of a physical building, it serves as a blueprint for both the system itself and the development process, delineating the tasks to be carried out by the development team. In e-business, a wide variety of such architectures can be found. These have evolved over time, and the emergence and subsequent developments of the Internet have been decisive factors in shaping applications and their associated software architectures. In the 1980s, the purpose of an application was to run on a single computer, but today, applications are increasingly interconnected and accessible from anywhere. Practitioners have realized that a sound architecture is critical for success in both design and development. In order to incorporate domain-specific semantics, knowledge graphs must become a key ingredient to architectural thinking and the codification of principles, methods, and practices has led to repeatable architectural design processes. However, despite these advancements, the field of software architecture remains relatively immature in its relation to knowledge graphs and how to leverage them for e-business – towards this goal, traditional architectural patterns such as MVCs will be revisited in this paper.