Fuzzy Ontology for Requirements Determination and Documentation During Software Development

Abstract

Every business has an underlying information system. Quality and creditability of a system depend mainly on provided requirements. Good quality requirements of a system increase the degree of quality of the system. Hence, requirements determinations is of prime importance. Inadequate and misunderstood requirements are major problems in requirements determination. Major stakeholders of the requirements are non-computer professional users, who may provide imprecise, vague, and ambiguous requirements. Further, the system development process may be partly automated and based on platform such as web or Semantic Web. In this case, a proper ontology to represent requirements is needed. The chapter proposes a fuzzy RDF/XML-based ontology to document various requirements. A generic architecture of requirements management system is also provided. To demonstrate the presented approach, a case of student monitoring and learning is presented with sample software requirements specifications and interfaces to collect requirements. The chapter concludes with advantages, applications, and future enhancements.