The Role of Ontology in Agent-Oriented Requirements Analysis

Goals identification is an open issue in the Requirement Analysis field for Multi-Agent System design. Stakeholders commonly don’t have full and exhaustive awareness about their real objectives in the domain problem. Goals are implicitly expressed during the inquiring phase. Thus, the goal identification task is commonly ascribed to the expertise of the analyst. In this work we propose a new methodological approach to formalize the problem domain in terms of its ontological representation. We also introduce a new heuristic for extraction and validation of goals from the problem description. In this approach the domain can provide evidences for the identification of unvoiced goals and for their validation according to the contextual data.