Description logic representation for requirement specification

Abstract

With the size and complexity of many software systems increasing, they need to give a greater emphasis to capture and maintain requirement knowledge within the software development process. This knowledge can be captured by the requirement ontology. But the requirement analysis systems must balance expressivity and inferential power with the real demands of requirement ontologies construction, maintenance, performance, and comprehensibility. Description logics (DLs) possess several features - a terminological orientation, a formal semantics, and efficient reasoning procedures - which offer an effective tradeoff of these factors. In this paper, we use description logics SHIQ to define the objects and their relations, and identify the subsumptions capturing the constraints and relationships among the objects. We show how the subsumptions can be used to answer some questions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.