Towards a cost-effective and reusable traceability system. A semantic approach

•A holistic approach for traceability services.•Design of a context-independent and affordable system.•Definition of a semantic model to capture the traceability domain knowledge.•Implementation and evaluation of a traceability platform. Industrial processes are not just concerned with efficiency but also with their traceability and accountability. Nowadays, the proper evaluation of parameters in the quality domain is gaining momentum. Even as holistic systems concerned with the provision of these services are a hot topic, there is a gap on the provision of such systems for traceability under the premises of reusability and low deployment costs. The authors of this work were compelled to provide with such system based on the use of semantic technologies. Interested readers can find a thorough description of models and methods leading to the proposed platform. Discussions about worthy features related to the use of semantic technologies are also included along with lessons learned for further attempts.