Abstract

Context maps are a kind of high-level notational technology which has been increasingly used in information system and software engineering over the last few years. Recent efforts using Microsoft (MS) Excel spreadsheets to represent the context maps have shown some progress toward meeting the various needs for the development of context maps. However, as more applications developed for the manipulation of context maps, complying with the technical requirements imposed by MS Excel limits their functionalities and further development. Extensible Markup Language (XML) and related technologies may be used to help to overcome current limitations. This thesis introduces a new way of XML-based context maps to represent formatted knowledge. Structured information stored in XML format is very easily exchanged among different applications. This makes XML a natural choice to be used as a representation format for the context maps. A Java-based application named CMapViewer has been developed to view and manipulate the XML-based context maps and it demonstrates an easy, intuitive and powerful solution for manipulating the formatted knowledge. In addition, an appropriate tool has been developed to allow users to transform current context map documents into the XML-based formats. This service demonstrates the implementation of solutions for the interoperability of XML-based context maps.