ReqSpecOnto: Investigating Explicit Software Requirements Specification

Abstract

Specification of customer's need as software requirements in natural language create ambiguities in requirements and may also lead to failure of the software project. Generally, customers are unable to define their needs due to lack of domain understanding, technological constraints and knowledge gap between stakeholders and requirements analysts. One of the most effective approaches to minimize these gaps and ambiguities is the usage of ontologies for requirements specification and validation. However, the current approaches are mostly limited only to the translation of ambiguous software requirements. In this paper, we have discussed, analyzed and compared the current usage of these ontologies and found that these approaches are time-consuming and create complexities in the overall development process. We have presented a requirements specification ontology (ReqSpecOnto), bypassing the need for creating an ambiguous Software Requirement Specification (SRS). The upper software requirements ontology is defined in Ontology Web Language (OWL) that can be applied in different software scenarios. A case study of budget and planning system for a state physics lab is selected to specify its requirements as derived ontology from the upper ontology created. Results are validated through HermiT and Pellet reasoners to verify defined relationships and constraints. Finally, SPARQL queries are used to obtain the necessary requirements.