Smart Specifications - On the Move to Ontology-Supported Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering deals with the definition, documentation and maintenance of requirements in systems and software engineering. It is one of the most crucial areas in systems development, as mistakes introduced during the requirements elicitation often result in faulty systems or systems that do not comply with the stakeholder needs. Typical problems are, e.g., missing requirements (the stakeholders were not aware of them or did not communicate them), ambiguously formulated or competing requirements. To correct errors introduced in the requirements later during the development process, or even after delivery, is costly and not always possible. This is a high risk, especially in safety critical domains such as aerospace engineering. Requirements engineering tasks are in their quintessence knowledge management tasks. Knowledge about the system-to-be and its application domain is gathered from many stakeholders and other sources and captured in the requirements. Documentation of requirements and later management tasks, such as change management, require not only domain knowledge, but also knowledge about requirements engineering practices. The utilisation of ontologies to formalise this knowledge seems promising, as these are especially suited to support machine reasoning and semantic interoperability for consistency and completeness checks.

Katharina Grosser, Smart Specifications - On the Move to Ontology-Supported Requirements Engineering