Domain Requirements Elicitation and Analysis - An Ontology-Based Approach

Domain requirements are fundamental for software reuse and are the product of domain analysis. This paper presents an approach to elicit and analyze domain requirements based on ontology. Using subjective decomposition method, problem domain is decomposed into several sub problem domains. The top-down refinement method is used to refine each sub problem domain into primitive requirements, which are specified using ontology definition. Abstract stakeholders are used instead of real ones when decomposing problem domain and ontology is used to represent domain primitive requirements. Not only domain commonality, variability and qualities are presented, but also reasoning logic is used to detect and handle incompleteness and inconsistency of domain requirements. In addition, a case of ‘spot and futures trading’ e-business is used to illustrate the approach.

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