The system development community harbours knowledge about the system being
developed. The communication occurring within a system development community
essentially is aimed at creating, furthering, and disseminating this knowledge.
Depending on their concerns, stakeholders will be interested in different knowledge
topics pertaining to the system being developed.
We will now briefly explore the kinds of knowledge that are relevant to a system
and its development; in other words, the knowledge topics that can be distinguished.
In the next subsections, we will discuss in more detail in what ways this
knowledge can be made (more) explicit.
During system development, members of the system development community
will create and exchange knowledge pertaining to different topics. We can make a
first distinction between the target domain pertaining to the system being developed
and the project domain, about the development process itself. We have borrowed
these terms from the Information Services Procurement Library (ISPL) (Franckson and Verhoef 1999). For both of these knowledge domains, further refinements can
be made with regards to the possible topics. We identify the following additional
characterisations: