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.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. IEEE Std 830 (1998)
OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Direct Semantics. Tech. rep., W3C (2009), http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-direct-semantics-20091027/
Cobleigh, R., Avrunin, G., Clarke, L.: User Guidance for Creating Precise and Accessible Property Specifications. In: 14th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 208–218. ACM, New York (2006)
Denger, C., Berry, D., Kamsties, E.: Higher Quality Requirements Specifications through Natural Language Patterns. In: 2003 IEEE International Conference on Software - Science, Technology and Engineering, pp. 80–90. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2003)
Egyed, A., Grunbacher, P.: Identifying Requirements Conflicts and Cooperation: How Quality Attributes and Automated Traceability Can Help. IEEE Software 21(6), 50–58 (2004)
Elazhary, H.H.: REAS: An Interactive Semi-Automated System for Software Requirements Elicitation Assistance. IJEST 2(5), 957–961 (2010)
Gotel, O., Finkelstein, C.: An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem. In: 1st International Conference on Requirements Engineering, pp. 94–101 (1994)
Gottesdiener, E.: Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2002)
Hull, E., Jackson, K., Dick, J.: Requirements Engineering. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Ibrahim, N., Kadir, W., Deris, S.: Propagating Requirement Change into Software High Level Designs towards Resilient Software Evolution. In: 16th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, pp. 347–354. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2009)
Jackson, J.: A Keyphrase Based Traceability Scheme. IEEE Colloquium on Tools and Techniques for Maintaining Traceability During Design, 2/1–2/4 (1991)
Kaindl, H.: The Missing Link in Requirements Engineering. Software Engineering Notes 18, 30–39 (1993)
Kaiya, H., Saeki, M.: Ontology Based Requirements Analysis: Lightweight Semantic Processing Approach. In: 5th Int. Conf. on Quality Software, pp. 223–230 (2005)
Kitamura, M., Hasegawa, R., Kaiya, H., Saeki, M.: A Supporting Tool for Requirements Elicitation Using a Domain Ontology. Software and Data Technologies, 128–140 (2009)
Kotonya, G., Sommerville, I.: Requirements Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1998)
Matsuo, Y., Ogasawara, K., Ohnishi, A.: Automatic Transformation of Organization of Software Requirements Specifications. In: 4th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, pp. 269–278. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2010)
Omoronyia, I., Sindre, G., Stålhane, T., Biffl, S., Moser, T., Sunindyo, W.: A Domain Ontology Building Process for Guiding Requirements Elicitation. In: 16th REFSQ, pp. 188–202 (2010)
Pedrinaci, C., Domingue, J., Alves de Medeiros, A.K.: A Core Ontology for Business Process Analysis. In: Bechhofer, S., Hauswirth, M., Hoffmann, J., Koubarakis, M. (eds.) ESWC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5021, pp. 49–64. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Rupp, C.: Requirements-Engineering und -Management. Hanser (2002)
Ståhane, T., Omoronyia, I., Reichenbach, F.: Ontology-Guided Requirements and Safety Analysis. In: 6th International Conference on Safety of Industrial Automated Systems (2010)
Watkins, R., Neal, M.: Why and How of Requirements Tracing. IEEE Software 11(4), 104–106 (1994)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Farfeleder, S., Moser, T., Krall, A., Stålhane, T., Omoronyia, I., Zojer, H. (2011). Ontology-Driven Guidance for Requirements Elicitation. In: Antoniou, G., et al. The Semanic Web: Research and Applications. ESWC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6644. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21064-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21064-8_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21063-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21064-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)