Automated ontology construction from scenario based software requirements using clustering techniques

Ontologies have been utilized in many different areas of software engineering. As software systems grow in size and complexity, the need to devise methodologies to manage the amount of information and knowledge becomes more apparent. Utilizing ontologies in requirement elicitation and analysis is very practical as they help to establish the scope of the system and facilitate information reuse. Moreover ontologies can serve as a natural bridge to transition from the requirements gathering stage to designing the architecture for the system. However manual construction of ontologies is time consuming, error prone and subjective. Therefore it is greatly beneficial to devise automated methodologies which allow knowledge extraction from system requirements using an automated and systematic approach. This paper introduces an approach to systematically extract knowledge from system requirements to construct different views of ontologies for the system as a part of a comprehensive framework to analyze and validate software requirements and design.