Semantic requirements construction using ontologies and boilerplates

Abstract

This paper presents a combination of an ontology and boilerplates, which are requirements templates for the syntactic structure of individual requirements that try to alleviate the problem of ambiguity caused using natural language and make it easier for inexperienced engineers to create requirements. However, still the use of boilerplates restricts the use of natural language only syntactically and not semantically. Boilerplates consists of fixed and attributes elements. Using ontologies, restricts the vocabulary of the words used in the requirements boilerplates to entities, their properties and entity relationships that are semantically meaningful to the application domain, leading thus to fewer errors. In this work we combine the advantages of boilerplates and ontologies. Usually, the attributes of boilerplates are completed with the help of the ontology. The contribution of this paper is that the whole boilerplates are stored in the ontology, based on the fact that RDF triples have similar syntax to the boilerplate syntax, so that attributes and fixed elements are part of the ontology. This combination helps to construct semantically and syntactically correct requirements. The contribution and novelty of our method is that we exploit the natural language syntax of boilerplates mapping them to Resource Description Framework triples which have also a linguistic nature. In this paper we created and present the development of a domain-specific ontology as well as a minimal set of boilerplates for a specific application domain, namely that of engineering software for an ATM, while maintaining flexibility on the one hand and generality on the other.