Using OWL Ontologies as a Domain-Specific Language for Capturing Requirements for Formal Analysis and Test Case Generation

摘要

Our experience at GE Research suggests that the use of a controlled-English grammar and a rich authoring environment can greatly facilitate subject matter experts' ability to understand, create, and collaboratively employ models. A domain ontology is an ideal foundation for many advanced capabilities. An example is extending our controlled-English grammar and authoring environment for OWL model generation to allow the capture of high-level requirements, assumptions, and assertions, enabling requirement engineers to create models of system capability and behavior amenable to formal methods analysis to detect incompleteness, conflict, and a variety of other issues. The same domain models and formal requirements can be used to automatically generate test cases and test procedures. Automated test generation represents a huge reduction in the time and effort required to create and validate critical software. In this paper we illustrate how ontologies enable the ASSERT? tool suite to support the above capabilities through a small grounding use case.