Using business content explorer for smarter projects

Abstract

We built a standalone tool, the Business Content Explorer, to provide domain-specific content, consisting of concepts, business rules, metrics and business processes that are readily available to IT professionals (software architects and developers). This tool structures content based on the Business Content Hierarchy (BCH). The novelties in the tool are: (a) how the user can use the tool, and (b) how the content is created. The user is able to use the tool to browse both relevant and authoritative content, and also view its evolution over different projects. Specifically, the user can select a specific subset that can be used in their project, enhance it, export it, and then re-import the extended content to reconcile it with the master content. For content creation, we followed a novel, semi-automated, method in which public documents such Request for Proposals (RFPs), tenders and papers are collected; then, content extraction techniques in off-the-shelf tools are used to identify content. © 2010 Authors.