There have been many researches about construction and application of ontology in reality, notably the usage of ontology to support requirements engineering. The effect of ontology-based requirements engineering depends on quality of ontology. With the increasing size of ontology, it is difficult to verify the correctness of information stored in ontology. This paper will propose a method of using rules for verification the correctness of requirements ontology. We provide a rule description language to specify properties that requirements ontology should satisfy. Then, by checking whether the rules are consistent with requirements ontology, we verify the correctness of the ontology. We have developed a verification tool to support the method and evaluated the tool through experiments.

This paper introduces an ontology-based method for checking requirements specification. Requirements ontology is a knowledge structure that contains functional requirements (FR), attributes of FR and relations among FR. Requirements specification is compared with functional nodes in the requirements ontology, then rules are used to find errors in requirements. On the basis of the results, requirements team can ask questions to customers and correctly and efficiently revise requirements. To support this method, an ontology-based checking tool for verification of requirements has been developed. Finally, the requirements checking method is evaluated through an experiment.