Ontology-driven guidance for requirements elicitation

Abstract

Requirements managers aim at keeping their sets of requirements well-defined, consistent and up to date throughout a project's life cycle. Semantic web technologies have found many valuable applications in the field of requirements engineering, with most of them focusing on requirements analysis. However the usability of results originating from such requirements analyses strongly depends on the quality of the original requirements, which often are defined using natural language expressions without meaningful structures. In this work we present the prototypic implementation of a semantic guidance system used to assist requirements engineers with capturing requirements using a semi-formal representation. The semantic guidance system uses concepts, relations and axioms of a domain ontology to provide a list of suggestions the requirements engineer can build on to define requirements. The semantic guidance system is evaluated based on a domain ontology and a set of requirements from the aerospace domain. The evaluation results show that the semantic guidance system effectively supports requirements engineers in defining well-structured requirements. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.