Domain Ontology for Requirements Classification in Requirements Engineering Context

Abstract

Research in recent years has shown a merge between the areas of requirements engineering and semantic technologies. With the release of the semantic concept and the progress of semantic technologies, the opportunities for applying ontologies as a means to define information and knowledge semantics have become increasingly accepted in different domains. Concurrently, the implementation of most requirements classification techniques does not handle the semantic aspects of requirements. If the meaning of requirements and their relations can be handled, software developers can obtain more effective requirement classifications to produce requirements specifications of higher quality. In this study, a domain ontology is proposed to present a requirements classification technique that can be used to share and describe different classifications. The proposed ontology is built using a systematic method based on Methontology and it is implemented using Protégé. The developed ontology was successfully evaluated using validation and verification tests. The validation test included the evaluation of content and competency questions, while the verification test included the evaluation of taxonomy and the implementation of the FOCA method. The proposed ontology may represent a significant contribution to ontology libraries. In addition, this ontology can be used in several ways to increase the quality of software requirements specification documents. It could also ensure consistency between requirements, and facilitate communication between requirements engineers owing to the use of same terminologies for various software applications.