An Ontological Pivot Model to Interoperate Heterogeneous User Requirements

With the globalisation, the development of advanced applications and complex systems requires the implication of a large number of designers that may come from different fields, departments, research laboratories, etc. Usually, they are free to use their favourite vocabularies and formalisms to express the requirements related to their assigned parts of a given project. Various formalisms exist to express user requirements: informal (interviews), semi-formal (UML use case, goal oriented, etc.) and formal (B-Method, etc.). The concepts and properties used by these formalisms may belong to different alphabets. This situation makes the interoperability between user requirement formalism models difficult. In this paper, we propose a conceptual ontology-driven approach to facilitate this interoperability and to reduce the heterogeneities between formalisms. We first present the concepts related to conceptual ontologies and their connection with the user requirement formalisms. Secondly, a pivot model allowing the integration of different semi-formal models is described, through a case study. Finally, an implementation based on model driven approach (MDA) is given.

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