Combining ontologies for requirements elicitation

A variety of ontologies are used to define and represent knowledge in many domains. Many ontological approaches have been successfully applied in the field of Requirements Engineering. In order to successfully harness the disparate ontologies, researchers have focused on various ontology merging techniques. However, no serious attempts have been made in the area of Requirements Elicitation where ontology merging has the potential to be quite effective in generating requirements specifications quickly through the means of reasoning based on combined ontologies. This paper attempts to define an approach needed to effectively combine ontologies to enhance the Requirements Elicitation process. A methodology is proposed whereby domain knowledge encapsulated in existing ontologies is combined with an ontology being developed to capture the requirements. Using this, requirements engineers would be able to create more refined Requirements Deliverables.