Ontology Based Requirements Analysis: Lightweight Semantic Processing Approach

We propose a software requirements analysis method based on domain ontology technique, where we can estab-lish a mapping between a software requirements specifica-tion and the domain ontology that represents semantic com-ponents. Our ontology system consists of a thesaurus and inference rules and the thesaurus part comprises domain specific concepts and relationships suitable for semantic processing. It allows requirements engineers to analyze a requirements specification with respect to the semantics of the application domain. More concretely, we demonstrate following three kinds of semantic processing through a case study, (1) detecting incompleteness and inconsistency in-cluded in a requirements specification, (2) measuring the quality of a specification with respect to its meaning and (3) predicting requirements changes based on semantic analy-sis on a change history