An engineerable ontology based approach for requirements elicitation in process centered problem domain

Requirements elicitation is one of the hardest and most critical parts of software development. Ontology technology provides a good way to support this work. In the literature, there many methods proposed about how to make use of ontology in requirement elicitation. However most of such methods assume that there already exists some domain ontology for reuse. Different from this works, our approach breaks this assumption and claims that we should merge the ontology acquiring process and the requirement elicitation process together. In order to do that, this paper proposes an upper level ontology for process centered problem domain to help the analysts to represent the requirement, and defines an engineerable process to guide the ontology acquiring integrated requirement elicitation process. In the end, we make a case study in the taxation domain to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.