Revisiting Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering in the age of the Semantic Web
Glen Dobson, Pete Sawyer · Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) · 2006
There is a long history of research into utilising ontologies in the Requirements Engineering process. An ontology is generally based upon some logical formalism, and has the benefits for requirements of explicitly modelling domain knowledge in a machine interpretable way, e.g. allowing requirements to be traced and checked for consistency by an inference engine, and software specifications to be derived. With the emergence of the semantic web, the interest in ontologies for Requirements Engineering is on the increase. Whilst efforts have been concentrated upon re-interpreting software engineering techniques for the semantic web, it is interesting to consider what benefits there are to be passed from the semantic web to traditional Software Engineering techniques. In this paper we give an overview of this emerging research field, suggesting directions that could usefully be taken in the field of dependability requirements. We present our work on a dependability ontology compliant with the IFIP Working Group 10.4 taxonomy and discuss how this, and other ontologies, must interact in the course of Dependability Requirements Engineering. In particular we consider the links between the dependability ontology, an ontology for requirements and domain ontologies, identifying the advantages and difficulties of this approach.