Automatically Acquiring the Requirements of Business Information Systems by using Business Ontology

Requirement elicitation is the most important parts in the development process of the Business Information Systems(BIS). Errors made at this stage are extremely expensive to correct when they are discovered during testing or during actual working. No ideal methods have been presented up to now. This paper proposes an approach for automatically acquiring the customers’ requirement by reusing the domain knowledge. Our knowledge base contains a business ontology and a set of generic domain models. By using this approach, the customers can describe their business information in a restricted natural language which do not contain any software terminology. And then, the construction of the application requirement specification can be divided into: selection of the domain, creation of the instance concepts, inheritance of the attributes and production of the specification. The construction algorithm has been given in this paper.