MURGROOM: multi-site requirement reuse through GRaph and ontology matching

In the era of globalization, it is strongly recommended for a company when developing a new project to identify companies (at local and international levels) that have already developed similar projects to reuse their experience and reproduce their findings. It should be noticed that the reuse is an eternal grail to increase projects productivity. It may concern all aspects of the life cycle of project development that ranges from user requirements to codes. In this study, we focus on user requirements. In such a context, each company (site) has already expressed its own requirements using different modeling formalisms, conceptualizations and vocabularies and scheduling of tasks. This situation makes the reuse and exploitation of the requirements harder, since the heterogeneity is everywhere. To reduce this heterogeneity, the most important studies assume the existence of pivot models and shared ontologies that allow reducing heterogeneities. Unfortunately, these hypotheses are out of phase with the reality, in which the sites are autonomous and usually multilingual. In this paper, we propose to relax these hypotheses. Firstly, we propose a framework for requirements integration using an ontology-based matching system that identifies and unifies different heterogeneous items. Secondly, a reasoning mechanism is proposed to deduce relationships between integrated requirements. Finally, our proposed framework is evaluated w.r.t its feasibility, results quality and effectiveness. A tool, called MURGROOM implementing the framework is also proposed.