Ontology Based Requirements Analysis

We propose a requirements analysis method by using a mapping between a requirements specification and an ontology that represents a specific application domain. Our ontology system consists of a thesaurus and inference rules that have concepts and relationships suitable for semantic processing. The ontology system enables requirements engineers to analyze a requirements specification with respect to the semantics of the application domain even though the system does not directly support natural language processing techniques. We demonstrate following three kinds of semantic processing through a case study, (1) detecting incompleteness and inconsistency about a requirements specification, (2) measuring the quality of a specification with respect to its meaning and (3) predicting requirements specification changes by mining change history.

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