An ontology-based requirement modeling for interactive software customization

The advancements in software product lines have initiated a shift of focus from the development of individual to lines of software products. Meanwhile, research in service ontology and service-oriented architecture is producing the much-needed technologies to link functional context of services with requirement features, and to automate the discovery and composition of services. This paper presents a novel approach of interactive requirements elicitation for the production of customized software systems. It first develops an ontology model to represent the knowledge of common and variable software assets, and then suggests a nine-step process to create instances of the ontology model as abstract requirement models for specific application domains. Moreover, an algorithm is developed to enable software clients to interactively “order” service-oriented software products by means of dialogue in natural language. In addition to technical details, this paper also includes a case study of an online book shopping system to demonstrate the operation of the proposed approach and to provide evidence of its usability.