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Applications of ontologies in requirements engineering: a systematic review of the literature

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Abstract

There is an increase use of ontology-driven approaches to support requirements engineering (RE) activities, such as elicitation, analysis, specification, validation and management of requirements. However, the RE community still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how ontologies are used in RE process. Thus, the main objective of this work is to investigate and better understand how ontologies support RE as well as identify to what extent they have been applied to this field. In order to meet our goal, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the primary studies on the use of ontologies in RE, following a predefined review protocol. We then identified the main RE phases addressed, the requirements modelling styles that have been used in conjunction with ontologies, the types of requirements that have been supported by the use of ontologies and the ontology languages that have been adopted. We also examined the types of contributions reported and looked for evidences of the benefits of ontology-driven RE. In summary, the main findings of this work are: (1) there are empirical evidences of the benefits of using ontologies in RE activities both in industry and academy, specially for reducing ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness of requirements; (2) the majority of studies only partially address the RE process; (3) there is a great diversity of RE modelling styles supported by ontologies; (4) most studies addressed only functional requirements; (5) several studies describe the use/development of tools to support different types of ontology-driven RE approaches; (6) about half of the studies followed W3C recommendations on ontology-related languages; and (7) a great variety of RE ontologies were identified; nevertheless, none of them has been broadly adopted by the community. Finally, we conclude this work by showing several promising research opportunities that are quite important and interesting but underexplored in current research and practice.

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Notes

  1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/.

  2. http://apps.webofknowledge.com.

  3. http://www.scopus.com.

  4. http://link.springer.com/.

  5. http://dl.acm.org/.

  6. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.

  7. http://www.engineeringvillage.com/.

  8. In this paper we also consider requirements management as a requirements phase.

  9. It is worth noting that even though BPM exclusive papers were excluded from this review in the selection process, some papers were included in the review because they used BPM together with other RE modelling styles in the study.

  10. Note that the UML category in this research is different from the UML category of RQ2. In this question UML modelling styles are modelled by the use of ontologies, by contrast, in RQ2, UML (e.g., class diagram) is used as a language to represent ontologies.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Brazilian institutions: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) e Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de Pernambuco (FACEPE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Systems and Computing Department, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande, PB, 58109-900, Brazil

    Diego Dermeval

  2. Campus Arapiraca, Federal University of Alagoas, Penedo, AL, 57200-000, Brazil

    Diego Dermeval

  3. Informatics Center, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, PE, 50.740-560, Brazil

    Jéssyka Vilela & Jaelson Castro

  4. Computing Institute, Federal University of Alagoas, Maceió, AL, 57072-900, Brazil

    Ig Ibert Bittencourt, Patrick Brito & Alan Silva

  5. Institute of Mathematics and Computational Sciences, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, SP, 13566-590, Brazil

    Seiji Isotani

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  1. Diego Dermeval
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  2. Jéssyka Vilela
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  3. Ig Ibert Bittencourt
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  4. Jaelson Castro
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  5. Seiji Isotani
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  6. Patrick Brito
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  7. Alan Silva
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Correspondence to Diego Dermeval.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Extraction form

See Table 14.

Table 14 Extraction form
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Appendix 2: Publication sources

See Table 15.

Table 15 Distribution of studies over publication sources
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Dermeval, D., Vilela, J., Bittencourt, I.I. et al. Applications of ontologies in requirements engineering: a systematic review of the literature. Requirements Eng 21, 405–437 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-015-0222-6

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