Ontologies in Checking for Inconsistency of Requirements Specification

In this paper, we investigate how ontologies developed for use in Semantic Web technology could be used in checking the consistency of requirements specifications. Our approach's main idea and original contribution is that we use reasoning which is a part of ontology. In the first step, we transform the static part of the UML model and its constraints into a problem ontology and try to discover contradictions using ontology reasoning. The contradictions that have been found indicate inconsistencies. In the second step, we try to discover contradictions between the problem ontology coming from the UML model, that represents the requirements, and the domain ontology, that represents the domain knowledge available in the software company. However, a limitation of this approach is: We cannot check the behavioral consistency because it is not possible to represent the dynamic part of the UML model in an ontology. This paper describes not only a concept but also the implementation and illustrating examples.