Gesper: Support to Capitalize on Experience in a Network of SMEs

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the most aected by the exponentially increasing complexity of the average software sys- tem: not losing the grip on the new technologies may turn out to be an unsustainable drain on productive eort, as their developers need to devote a substantial part of their time to learning instead of producing. In order to support continuous education and gathering/reusing solu- tions, SMEs need a formalized management of experience and knowl- edge, allowing the experts, or directly the needed information, to be found quickly by problem-driven searches. However, any formal process has its costs and to keep them as low as possible, the best solution is to support the required activities by a tool. We describe the experience gained in designing and developing Gesper, a tool for knowledge sharing that provides semantic searches based on ontologies. This tool has been tailored to the needs of SMEs and a pro- totype implementation has been built using free and open source tools and platforms.