Organizing knowledge to support requirements analysis

Capturing requirements in order to produce a complete and accurate specification for developing a software systems requires a deep understanding of domain knowledge. It becomes more difficult if the system analyst is dealing with a large-scale system specification without specific guidance. At the same time the system analyst is expected to be an expert in the formal language used for the presentation of the specification. One possible solution is to develop a tool embedded with knowledge, which should be able to support the system analyst with both domain knowledge and formal language. However, if various knowledge is included in the tool, it creates problems for organization. In this paper, we describe and discuss how we organize knowledge so that it is well represented to allow a system analyst to easily access, search and backtracking. We organize the knowledge using a hierarchical structure and apply the SOFL approach to support the process of constructing specifications. Our aim is to develop a knowledge-based supporting tool to help system analysts in constructing formal specifications.