Customizable rule-based verification of requirements ontology

Abstract

In using ontology to support requirements engineering, quality of elicited requirements depends on quality of requirements ontology, so a rule-based verification method of the correctness of requirements ontology has been proposed. However, in recent evaluation experiments, users of the method (ontology verifiers) described only a few new rules based on rule grammars and rule examples. That led to the number of correctly detected errors were not so high (less than 50% of the total number of errors). To improve our method, in this paper, we propose a rules customization mechanism in which simple specific rules are generated using pre-defined and customizable meta-rules. We expect that by using the improvement, ontology verifiers can easily and effectively generate and customize rules for verification of requirements ontology. The customization mechanism is illustrated through examples and a case study.