An Ontological Approach to Engineering Requirement Representation and Analysis

Date

2015-07

Authors

Mukhopadhyay, Alolika

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Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop an ontological method for measuring the information content of engineering design requirements, assessing their completeness and specificity, and automatically classifying them under predetermined classes. Information content can be used as a metric for evaluating the performance of engineering design teams with respect to information generation rate. Requirement plays an important role into idea generation. An incomplete requirement is not useful for a designer and might be misleading and also requirements should be specific or informative enough to efficiently narrow down the design space. A two-step method will be proposed for information content measurement. First, the textual requirements will be converted into an ontological representation and then the information metric will be applied to them. A Java-based tool will be developed for the automated measurement of the information content of requirements based on their ontological representation and proposed metrics. Also ontological reasoning techniques based semantic rules and axioms will be adopted for evaluating completeness and specificity of engineering requirements and classifying them under predefined classes. Multiple experiments will be designed and conducted to validate the proposed methods and metrics.

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Keywords

Ontology, Requirement, SWRL, Reasoning, Information content, Entropy, OWL API

Citation

Mukhopadhyay, A. (2015). <i>An ontological approach to engineering requirement representation and analysis</i> (Unpublished thesis). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

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