Eliciting Ethicality Requirements Using the Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering Method

Abstract

The advent of socio-technical, cyber-physical and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has broadened the scope of requirements engineering which must now deal with new classes of requirements, concerning ethics, privacy and trust. Unfortunately, requirements engineers cannot be expected to understand the qualities behind these new classes of systems so that they can conduct elicitation, analysis and operationalization. To address this issue, we propose a methodology for conducting requirements engineering which starts with the adoption of an ontology for a quality domain, such as ethicality, privacy or trustworthiness, populates the ontology for the system-to-be and conducts requirements analysis grounded on the populated ontology. We illustrate our proposal with ethicality requirements.