A semantic driven approach for requirements consistency verification

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a key discipline for the success of software projects. Consistency, completeness, and accuracy are the requirements quality properties to be guaranteed by the verification task in RE. An overview of the actual trends in RE is briefly summarized, focusing more closely on the requirements verification quality properties. Completeness results is the most difficult property to guarantee. It is hard to capture the software behavior against the whole external context. In the last years, research has focused its attention to the application of semantic Web techniques to the different tasks of RE. The adoption of ontologies seems promising to achieve the proper level of formalism and to argue on quality properties. This paper presents a survey of the main concepts that need to be accounted for requirement verification, and proposes an ontological engineering approach to demonstrate the overlapping of requirements against the external context.