Automated multiperspective requirements traceability using ontology matching technique

Abstract

Large-scaled software development inevitably involves a group of stakeholders, each of which may express their requirements differently in their own terminology and representation depending on their perspectives or perceptions of their problems. However, those stakeholders will need to interoperate or collaborate by tracing, verifying and merging their requirements 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. This paper presents an alternative multiperspective requirements traceability (MPRT) framework to automatically generate traceability relationships of multiperspective requirements artifacts. Requirements ontology is designed and constructed 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. As a result, the traceability relationships can be automatically generated when a match is found in the ontologies.