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dictionary having domain specific vocabularies called Language Extended Lexicon
[ 8] etc. However, we did not argue these pieces of individual usages of ontologies
but the possibilities of ontology usage as a semantic basis throughout RE processes
in this chapter. In fact, Sect. 3 presented the support for requirements elicitation
and specification activities, i.e. the first and second ones mentioned in Sect. 1. We
discussed the techniques for requirements management in Sect. 4, quality assur-
ance of requirements, and in Sect. 5, change management of requirements. As for
requirements validation, readers can understand that we also mentioned the tech-
nique to detect missing requirements, e.g. checking completeness of requirements
specifications, in Sects. 2, 3 and 4. Thus we have illustrated several techniques for
the four activities in RE processes, whose common basis is on providing lightweight
semantics for RE artifacts using ontologies. In [ 11] and Softwiki project, the authors
designed a Requirements Engineering Ontology called SWORE by collecting onto-
logical concepts such as Functional Requirement, Stakeholder, Scenario, Goal etc.,
which appeared in the existing RE techniques. The aim of this project seems to
be the construction of a common vocabulary of RE techniques for distributed col-
laborative development of requirements specifications, and is different from ours.
Although providing common meaning of terminology of RE techniques is one of
the significant benefits of using ontologies, deeper semantic analysis such as infer-
ences on ontologies allows us to develop and manage requirements of higher quality
as mentioned in this chapter. Future research agenda are developing more applica-
tions in RE processes and constructing a Semantic Repository of Requirements to
achieve our idea in practice.
As for the Semantic Repository, we have discussed reusability of semantically
annotated requirements in [ 15] and proposed the unified ontology with the other
types of ontologies for implementation structures such as architecture ontology,
framework ontology, etc. Furthermore, the technique to retrieve reusable parts of
requirements was discussed. We should elaborate these techniques to achieve a
practical semantic repository, as shown in Fig. 10.
In a current version of our idea, we use a word or a phrase as an ontological con-
cept. In the example of Fig. 3, we used the single word Stop to denote the concept
of a stop action. However, a word itself is less informative and includes too gen-
eral concepts. Although we can express that a stop action follows a move action,
we cannot specify that a stop action and a move action should occur on the same
lift in this action causality. We should focus not only on words but also on the
connections among the words to represent ontological concepts. The application of
Case Grammar is one of the promising approaches [13, 17] . In the case grammar
approach, ontological concepts can be defined as case frames as shown in Fig. 11,
and the relationships among ontological concepts are considered as the relationships
among case frames [ 22] . In the figure, the slots of case frames are represented with
variables, e.g. x , and filled with concrete words which appear in requirements. The
same variables in the case frames should denote the same objects. For example,
the same word “lift” should be assigned to two occurrences of variable x in the case
frames “move” and “stop”, and a self-loop of a “stop” message sending is suggested
to add in the sequence diagram. The usage of Case Grammar approach is also one
of the significant research directions.
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