Domain modeling based on requirements specification and ontology

Abstract

Domain model plays an important role in software development. Typically, it is a primary input to elaboration of a system model which in turn is translated into source code and related database schemas. Effective development of domain model is a part of requirement engineering during which domain experts are employed to identify domain entities and relationships among them. We claim that this task can be supported by the use of domain ontologies from which interesting knowledge can be extracted. The starting point to knowledge extraction is an existing requirements specification. In this paper, we investigate how the form of requirements specification influences the quality of extracted model. Some measures allowing to assess the quality are introduced. A case study has shown that in the most cases the simplified version of a requirements specification is enough to obtain a satisfactory domain model, however if the domain is very complex, the extended version of requirements specification could be necessary.