Toward a meta-ontology for accurate ontologies to specify domain specific experiments in software engineering

Background: Experiments have been conducted in many domains of software engineering (SE). Objective: This paper presents a meta-ontology containing the common concepts present in any SE experiment. This meta-ontology aims at simplifying the proposition of accurate domain specific ontologies for the SE experiments. Method: The paper presents results of an exploratory study that proposes a general ontologyS and its specialization for the domain of coding experiments. Besides, we present how this domain specific ontology specifies a real experiment. Results: The ontology for coding experiments was modeled with few elements. Moreover, it focused only on elements specific to the coding activities. Conclusions: Our meta-ontology facilitates the development of a domain specific ontology in SE, however more research is necessary to evaluate our meta-ontology in other domains of SE.