Semantic Interoperability Aggregation in Service Requirements Refinement

Semantic refinement of stakeholders’ requirements is a fundamental issue in requirements engineering. Facing with the on-demand collaboration problem among the heterogeneous, autonomous, and dynamic service resources in the Web, service requirements refinement becomes extremely important, and the key issue in service requirements refinement is semantic interoperability aggregation. A method for creating connecting ontologies driven by requirement sign ontology is proposed. Based on connecting ontologies, a method for semantic interoperability aggregation in requirements refinement is proposed. In addition, we discover that the necessary condition for semantic interoperability is semantic similarity, and the sufficient condition is the coverability of the agreed mediation ontology. Based on this viewpoint, a metric framework for calculating semantic interoperability capability is proposed. This methodology can provide a semantic representation mechanism for refining users’ requirements; meanwhile, since users’ requirements in the Web usually originate from different domains, it can also provide semantic interoperability guidance for networked service discovery, and is an effective approach for the realization of on-demand service integration. The methodology will be beneficial in service-oriented software engineering and cloud computing.