Multi-Representation Ontology for Requirements Specification

The requirements specification step is considered as a crucial step involved during the requirements analysis in the life cycle of an information system. This step is considered as a contract between future users and designers. It concerns the expected characteristics: functional and non-functional requirements. However, many problems arise in this step such as the difficulty of gathering information, misunderstanding and incomplete requirements, lack of opportunities and constraints of the proposed systems, etc. In addition, requirements risk is unclear. This materializes in particular by conflict profiles, points of view and contexts among different users admitting different techniques to specify their requirements. For this reason, we propose a multi-representation ontology (MRO) for requirements specification (RS) to solve the multi-context and the multi-representation problems. This paper proposes a MRO to enhance the effectiveness of RS. It presents the complementarities between context and ontology. It exposes an approach to establish the MRO providing the formalization and the visualization of this ontology. The proposed ontology is operationally defined in ContextOntoMR prototype.