Domain ontologies in the context of Requirements Engineering

Context: obtaining accurate information about the problem domain for which the software is being developed is one of most important and difficult activity of the Requirements Engineering (RE). One of the strategies to deal with problem domain concepts and their relationships is the usage of domain ontologies. However, there are not studies in the literature that describe which ontology-based approaches exist and how they have been applied in the RE context. Goal: this paper aims to identify, understand and catalog existing primary studies in the literature regarding to this subject. Method: for this, a Systematic Mapping was conducted and sixty-seven studies were analyzed and cataloged. Some results are: (i) there are five main ways of using ontologies in the context of RE and they are related to “Requirements Elicitation”, “Requirements Analysis”, “Requirements Verification”, “Conflict Identification and Analysis” and “Unification among requirements formalisms”; (ii) there are few evaluation studies about this subject; among others.