SPECIFYING MULTIPLE-VIEWED SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS WITH CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS

Among the phases of software development, requirements are particularly difficult to specify and analyze, since requirements for any large software system originate with many different people. Each person's view of the software requirements may be expressed in a different notation based on that person's knowledge, experience, and vocabulary. To perform a knowledge-based analysis of the requirements in combination, a single knowledge representation must be capable of capturing the information expressible in several existing requirements notations. This article introduces notation of conceptual graphs based on semantic networks that provides a general representation. Four common requirements notations are shown to be expressible using conceptual graphs; algorithms and examples are provided.