A Template-based Analysis of GRL

The goal-oriented paradigm is widely popular in Requirements Engineering. However, the central notion of goal remains one of the most controversial in the field. A possible cause might be that research has devoted too little attention to studying the ontological foundations of goal-oriented languages. In this paper, we have studied the case of GRL, the goal-oriented requirements language being standardized by the ITU. Our analysis followed the template-based approach proposed by Opdahl and Henderson-Sellers. After defining a metamodel for GRL, we have applied the template to each of its constructs to extract and formalize detailed syntactic and semantic information. The semantic part of the template focuses on establishing a mapping between a construct and its meaning, defined in term of the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. Evaluations of both GRL and the template are provided as well as suggestions to improve them.

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