This chapter discusses the key concepts associated with the world of model-based requirements engineering. The concepts and terminology introduced here are used throughout the rest of the book and form the basis of the context-based approach to model-based requirements engineering. To capture and describe the concepts and terminology, an 'ontology' is introduced. An ontology, in the context of this book, provides a visualisation of all the key concepts, the terminology used to describe them and the inter-relationships between said concepts. The ontology, however, is much more than just a data dictionary and plays a pivotal role in the definition and use of any rigorous framework. The use of ontologies for defining frameworks for architectures, such as enterprise architectures, process architectures, system architectures and so on, is one that is well established and used extensively throughout industry. For examples of the use of ontologies, see References 1-3. Whenever any framework is defined in terms of a set of views, an ontology is essential. It is the ontology that enforces the consistency and rigour demanded by such frameworks. The ontology that is introduced here covers all of the concepts pertinent to model-based requirements engineering and then, in the next chapter, a number of views are defined based on this ontology. Each view will focus on, and expand upon, a subset of the ontology and instantiate, or realise, specific concepts in the context of a real system or project. The use of the ontology for specifying views is shown explicitly in the next chapter, where the framework is introduced and described in some detail.

Inspec keywords: ontologies (artificial intelligence); systems analysis; data visualisation

Other keywords: process architectures; context based approach; model based requirements engineering; data dictionary; enterprise architectures; concept visualisation; system architectures; ontology

Subjects: Systems analysis and programming