From Scattered to Structured: A Vision for Automating Architectural Knowledge Management

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Keim, Jan, Kaplan, Angelika
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Keim, Jan
Kaplan, Angelika
author_facet Keim, Jan
Kaplan, Angelika
contents Software architecture is inherently knowledge-centric. The architectural knowledge is distributed across heterogeneous software artifacts such as requirements documents, design diagrams, code, and documentation, making it difficult for developers to access and utilize this knowledge effectively. Moreover, as systems evolve, inconsistencies frequently emerge between these artifacts, leading to architectural erosion and impeding maintenance activities. We envision an automated pipeline that systematically extracts architectural knowledge from diverse artifacts, links them, identifies and resolves inconsistencies, and consolidates this knowledge into a structured knowledge base. This knowledge base enables critical activities such as architecture conformance checking and change impact analysis, while supporting natural language question-answering to improve access to architectural knowledge. To realize this vision, we plan to develop specialized extractors for different artifact types, design a unified knowledge representation schema, implement consistency checking mechanisms, and integrate retrieval-augmented generation techniques for conversational knowledge access.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19548
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Scattered to Structured: A Vision for Automating Architectural Knowledge Management
Keim, Jan
Kaplan, Angelika
Software Engineering
Software architecture is inherently knowledge-centric. The architectural knowledge is distributed across heterogeneous software artifacts such as requirements documents, design diagrams, code, and documentation, making it difficult for developers to access and utilize this knowledge effectively. Moreover, as systems evolve, inconsistencies frequently emerge between these artifacts, leading to architectural erosion and impeding maintenance activities. We envision an automated pipeline that systematically extracts architectural knowledge from diverse artifacts, links them, identifies and resolves inconsistencies, and consolidates this knowledge into a structured knowledge base. This knowledge base enables critical activities such as architecture conformance checking and change impact analysis, while supporting natural language question-answering to improve access to architectural knowledge. To realize this vision, we plan to develop specialized extractors for different artifact types, design a unified knowledge representation schema, implement consistency checking mechanisms, and integrate retrieval-augmented generation techniques for conversational knowledge access.
title From Scattered to Structured: A Vision for Automating Architectural Knowledge Management
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19548