A domain ontology building process for guiding requirements elicitation

Abstract

[Context and motivation] In Requirements Management, ontologies are used to reconcile gaps in the knowledge and common understanding among stakeholders during requirement elicitation, and therefore significantly improve the quality of the elicited requirements.[Question/problem] However, a precondition of state-of-the-art ontology approaches for requirements elicitation is an existing domain ontology. While this is not a trivial precondition, there are only a few reports on approaches to systematically and efficiently build domain ontologies, and these approaches are often highly biased towards their intended use. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we investigate an approach for building domain ontologies suitable for guiding requirements elicitation. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach based on a real-world industrial use case by analyzing natural language text from technical standards. [Contribution] A major outcome is that the proposed approach can help reduce the effort of building domain ontologies from the scratch. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.