The Use of Ontologies in Requirements Engineering

Abstract - With the advent of the Semantic Web and the technologies for its realization, the possibilities for applying ontologies as a means to define the information and knowledge semantics become more and more accepted in different domains. The nature of requirements engineering involves capturing knowledge from diverse sources, including many stakeholders with their own interests and points of view. There are, therefore, many potential uses of ontologies in Requirements Engineering (RE). The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively review and present these uses. The main contribution is the classification of approaches that include ontologies within RE, with the aim of clarifying the way in which traditional RE techniques can benefit from them. Furthermore, future trends are identified. Keywords- Requirem ents Engineering, Ontologies, Fram ework I. I NTRODUCTION ntology can be defined as a specification of a conceptualization [1]. More precisely, ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the entities that exist in a given dom ain of interest and the relationships that hold am ong them [2]. In general, for an ontology to be useful, it m ust represent a shared, agreed upon conceptualization.Ontologies have been used in many contexts and for m any purposes throughout the years due to, principally, the advent of the Sem antic Web [3]. Recently, the use of ontologies in software engineering has gained popularity for two m ain reasons: (i) they facilitate the sem antic interoperability and (ii) they facilitate machine reasoning. Researchers have so far proposed m any different synergies between software engineering and ontologies [4]. For example, ontologies are proposed to be used in requirements engineering [5], software im plem entation [6], and software maintenance [7] [8].There is an increasing am ount of research devoted to utilizing ontologies in software engineering, and Requirem ents Engineering in particular. Thus, the m ain objective of this paper is to further examine this trend. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the m ain concepts related to Requirements Engineering and Ontological Engineering. Section 3 analyzes the benefits of applying ontologies in Requirem ents Engineering and presents a fram ework for integrating ontologies in Requirements ____________________