Efficient, Unified, and Intelligent User Requirement Collection and Analysis in Global Enterprises

In order to successfully benefit from global markets, companies must expand their activities over the world. This expansion is usually performed by the development of software involving all heterogeneous and autonomous partners. The user requirement collection and analysis is one of the most important phase of the life cycle of software development. In the context of globalization, this phase becomes a challenging issue. This is because designers of each branch of a given global company may use different vocabulary and formalism to express their requirements. Solutions exist in the literature to unify either vocabularies or formalisms, but not both. In this paper, we propose a semantic and scalable approach that unifies the vocabularies and formalisms by the means of ontologies. The capabilities of reasoning offered by ontologies is exploited to identify the inconsistencies in an efficient way. Our approach is validated by a case tool using three formalisms: the UML use case, the goal oriented and the treatment conceptual model of Merise method.