A Run-Time Approach of Combining Ontologies to Enhance Interactive Requirements Elicitation for Software Customization

This thesis highlights the recent developments in Requirements Engineering for Software Product Line Engineering, with a focus on the use of ontology in interactive Requirements Elicitation and the existing techniques of ontology operations. Recent research done in Requirements Elicitation has been towards using ontologies as a modeling basis for gathering requirements. A new algorithm has been developed to allow ontologies to be combined at run-time when gathering the requirements of software clients. By harnessing knowledge in other ontologies, a more refined set of requirements can be generated. A scenario illustrating the use of ontology combination towards acquiring requirements for mobile platforms is also provided. The proposed method further enhances the capability of interactive software customization, thus helping to make Software Product Line Engineering a new practice in software development