Knowledge-Assisted Ontology-Based Requirements Evolution

Reaching common level of understanding of a problem domain is one of the key challenges that stakeholders face during the requirements phase of a project. The stakeholders involved in requirements engineering (RE) attempt to achieve this goal through communication and knowledge sharing. The process of clarifying business problems and arriving at a specification necessitates developing a common vocabulary, assigning meanings to various business concepts, determining their interrelations, and reconciling stakeholders’ viewpoints. Oftentimes, knowledge exists in organizations, but is not maintained in a reusable form. To address the knowledge and collaboration needs of RE stakeholders, we have developed a Knowledge-Assisted Ontology-Based Requirements Evolution (K-RE) method and toolset. We demonstrate creation of a knowledge repository and its reuse in two contexts: (1) to resolve change requests (CR) with better speed and accuracy and (2) to jump-start a new project. We combine the social software principles and semantic Web concepts to achieve this.