Semantic Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) techniques play a crucial role in information systems development processes. There are many excellent techniques of RE to assist requirements analysts and stakeholders in producing requirements specification of higher quality, and some of them are put into practice in industry. However, one of the issues of these RE techniques is that they do not handle semantic aspects of requirements. If we can deal with the meaning of requirements by using automated techniques, we can get more effective RE techniques to produce requirements specifications of higher quality. In this chapter, we consider an ontology as a semantic domain so as to provide the meaning for requirements, and discuss the potentials of the RE techniques using an ontology as a semantic basis. Especially, we illustrate an extension of goal-oriented requirements analysis where this idea is embedded, i.e. we provide the semantics for goal descriptions written in natural language using a mapping from them to an ontology. The inference mechanisms of the ontology allow us to decompose a goal into sub-goals and to find missing goals. Furthermore, in this chapter we discuss the possibilities of the techniques to support the other activities of RE processes using this ontological technique, e.g. measuring quality metrics and controlling versions of requirements from a semantic view. Due to similarity to Semantic Web techniques, we call a family of these engineering techniques Semantic Requirements Engineering in this chapter.