Ontology-Driven Requirements Engineering in the Responsive and Formal Design Process

Abstract

Requirements that are understood and shared by all stakeholders as well as system engineers are highly critical in the development of a successful system. Natural languages (NL) are essentially preferred to represent requirements to advance this shared understanding. However, natural languages are inherently imprecise and ambiguous leading to inconsistent, incomplete, and incorrect requirements. Therefore, there is a need to represent requirements formally. In this paper, the use of ontologies for knowledge representation from requirements is presented for the responsive and formal design (RFD) process. The main goals are to (1) facilitate requirements engineering, (2) serve as an intermediate representation for automatic transition to logic-based modeling, and (3) formalize the process of transformation from requirements to logic-based modeling. Therefore, requirements engineering in the RFD process will be augmented using ontologies in the domain modeling of the system to be implemented. Ontologies are utilized to capture domain requirements, and formal mechanisms are used to check for inconsistency and incompleteness at each abstraction layer in the RFD process.