TACIT KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION FOR SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION (SRS): A PROPOSAL OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY DESIGN AND EXECUTION FOR KNOWLEDGE VISUALIZATION

Abstract

Knowledge extraction and visualization is becoming an important research area for the organizations in order to get and share the knowledge. Most important and useful part of the knowledge extraction and visualization is dedicated to tacit knowledge.

There are already known methods to acquire the tacit knowledge. Yet, these methods are mostly general approaches applicable to all the areas in need of tacit knowledge extraction and become too abstract when applied to a specific domain. One such specific domain is the requirement specification process for the software project development. Our own experiences in the area as well as the scientific researches have shown that Software Requirement Specification (SRS) process has field-specific problems that need to be eliminated by using the suitable tacit knowledge extraction techniques. For example, the experts and/or users may not have a clear idea of their requirements. They may also be technically unsophisticated or have different vocabularies than the software developers. Benefiting from the existing body of academic literature in the related fields, as well as co-authors' experience from their domains of practice, this paper aims to find the concrete methods for extracting the tacit knowledge in the area of software project development with specific implications for these academic fields and practice domains, as well as more general suggestions for all related or concerned.

To provide a base for future work, the paper also presents a proposal that aims to develop a tacit knowledge visualization framework to support know-where requirements of the organizational knowledge. With the implementation of our framework in a software application, it is aimed to create a virtual environment, where subject-based knowledge requirements will be answered by the visualized tacit knowledge of individuals and possibly the relations among individual members of the organization.