Towards an Ontology-Based Persona-Driven Requirements and Knowledge Engineering

This paper presents the development of ontologies for OntoPersonaURM, an Ontology-Based Persona-Driven User Requirements Modeling model, with goal of providing insights into the construction of ontologies for explicit specifications of the concept of persona in representing users' knowledge and characteristics, and the concepts of viewpoints, goals, scenarios, tasks, and requirements for Web application domain. OntoPersonaURM is composed of three interrelated ontologies: Persona Ontology, Behavioral-GST (Behavioral-Goal-Scenario-Task) Ontology, and Requirements Ontology. The objectives are to examine 1) how the concept of persona, in the context of the concepts of viewpoint, goal, scenario, task, and requirement, may be integrated in a unified environment and 2) how the concepts and their relationships may be specified ontologically. The explicit specifications of concepts and their relationships in the developed ontologies serve to establish a knowledge repository and foster common understanding of users' needs and behaviors among developers and stakeholders during the requirements analysis and modeling activity. We provide a running example of a university course registration web application domain to demonstrate the OntoPersonaURM model, consisting of UML class diagrams and explicit specifications of the concepts of the ontologies in the Protege-Frames ontology knowledge management environment. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.