FACIT-SME: A semantic recommendation system for enterprise knowledge interoperability

In the landscape of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) acting in the field of ICT, several Software Engineering methodologies and quality models are available. The FACIT-SME European FP-7 project (http://www.facit-sme.eu/) has the purpose to help SMEs in retrieving and exploiting such knowledge in order to find the development methodologies that best suit their characteristics. However, to achieve this result, the possibly huge amount of data should be filtered and organized from a semantic point of view. This paper targets the problem of acquiring and filtering this knowledge and of using it in order to provide a SME with suggestions about the best choises to make. The approach is meant to foster interoperability among SMEs, by performing semi-automatic extraction, synchronization and comparison of heterogeneous methodologies and quality models. The tool chosen to perform this task is a semantic Recommendation System, that allows a context-aware extraction of such semantically rich information. The evaluation phase shows that the Recommedation System realized can be seen a “semantic equalizer”, where the parameters act as switches and can be tuned according to the enterprise’s characteristics.