Developing Ontologies and Persona to Support and Enhance Requirements Engineering Activities – A Case Study

This paper provides an insight into incorporating persona concept and developing ontologies to support requirements engineering activities via a university course registration web application system case study. 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 to enable stakeholders and developers gain a better understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors and identify missing requirements early in the requirements engineering process, and (2) how the concepts and their relationships may be explicitly specified ontologically to help establish a knowledge repository and foster a shared common understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors among developers and stakeholders during the requirements analysis and modeling activity. A five-step iterative ontology development process is developed to help guide developers in the process of building the ontologies for the case study. We present the persona and viewpoint documents created and the ontology specifications specified in Protégé-Frames via applying our ontology development process.