Pre-conceptual Schema: A Conceptual-Graph-Like Knowledge Representation for Requirements Elicitation

A simple representation framework for ontological knowledge with dynamic and deontic characteristics is presented. It represents structural relationships (is-a, part/whole), dynamic relationships (actions such as register, pay, etc.), and conditional relationships (if-then-else). As a case study, we apply our representation language to the task of requirements elicitation in software engineering. We show how our pre-conceptual schemas can be obtained from controlled natural language discourse and how these diagrams can be then converted into standard UML diagrams. Thus our representation framework is shown to be a useful intermediate step for obtaining UML diagrams from natural language discourse.