Resolving multiperspective requirements traceability through ontology integration

Abstract

In a software development process, different stakeholders may deal with different pieces of software requirements depending on their perspectives or perception of their problems. Each of the stakeholders may define his/her requirements in his/her own point of view using different terminologies. However, a variety of stakeholders will need to intemperate, collaborate or trace requirements among each other in order to achieve a common goal of their development. In this situation, ontology can play an essential role in communication among diverse stakeholders in the course of an integrating system. In this paper, we propose an alternative multiperspective requirements traceability (MPRT) framework to automatically generate traceability relationships of multiperspective requirements artifacts. Requirements ontology is designed and built as a knowledge management mechanism to represent multiperspective requirements artifacts in a common way, which intervene mutual "understanding" among various stakeholders. Ontology matching takes two ontologies and produces correspondences (i.e., equivalence, more general, less general, mismatch and overlapping) between the concepts of ontologies that correspond semantically to each other. The traceability relationships are automatically generated when a match is found in the ontologies. © 2008 IEEE.