The feature list of modern IDEs is steadily growing and mastering these tools becomes more and more demanding, especially for novice programmers. Despite their remarkable capabilities, IDEs often still cannot directly answer the questions that arise during program comprehension tasks. Instead developers have to map their questions to multiple concrete queries that can be answered only by combining several tools and examining the output of each of them manually to distill an appropriate answer. Existing approaches have in common that they are either limited to a set of predefined, hardcoded questions, or that they require to learn a specific query language only suitable for that limited purpose. We present a framework to query for information about a software system using guided-input natural language resembling plain English. For that, we model data extracted by classical software analysis tools with an OWL ontology and use knowledge processing technologies from the Semantic Web to query it. We use a case study to demonstrate how our framework can be used to answer queries about static source code information for program comprehension purposes.

The success of the Semantic Web crucially depends on the existence of Web pages that provide machine-understandable meta-data. This meta-data is typically added in the semantic annotation process which is currently not part of the Web engineering process. Web engineering, however, proposes methodologies to design, implement and maintain Web applications but lack the generation of meta-data. In this paper we introduce a technique to extend existing Web engineering methodologies to develop semantically annotated Web pages. The novelty of this approach is the definition of a mapping from XML Schema to ontologies, called WEESA, that can be used to automatically generate RDF meta-data from XML content documents. We further show how we integrated the WEESA mapping into an Apache Cocoon transformer to easily extend XML based Web applications to semantically annotated Web application.

Large, global enterprises are increasingly faced with the problem of supporting employees that are on the move. Employees need to share business documents, locate expertise and knowledge through distributed searches, access effective subscription/notification mechanisms, and they need any time, anywhere access to the company's information resources. We address these problems and requirements in the MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) project and aim to create an advanced information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure for mobile teamwork. We give a brief description of the MOTION peer-to-peer platform for mobile teamwork.

Mobile teamwork has become an emerging requirement in the daily business of large enterprises. Employees collaborate across locations and need support while they are on the move. Business documents (artifacts) and expertise need to be shared independent of the actual location or connectivity (e.g., access through a mobile phone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, etc.) of employees. Although many collaboration tools and systems exist, most do not deal with new requirements such as locating artifacts and experts through distributed searches, advanced information subscription and notification, and mobile information sharing and access. The MOTION service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by taking into account the different connectivity modes of users, provides access support for various devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones, and uses XML meta-data and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and subscriptions. In this paper, we describe the architecture and the components of our generic MOTION service platform for building collaborative applications. The MOTION Teamwork Services Components are currently being evaluated in two industry case-studies.