In order to check requirement specifications written in natural language, we have chosen to model domain knowledge through an ontology and to formally represent user requirements by its population. Our approach of ontology population focuses on instance property identification from texts. We do so using extraction rules automatically acquired from a training corpus and a bootstrapping terminology. These rules aim at identifying instance property mentions represented by triples of terms, using lexical, syntactic and semantic levels of analysis. They are generated from recurrent syntactic paths between terms denoting instances of concepts and properties. We show how centring on instance property identification allows us to precisely identify concept instances explicitly or implicitly mentioned in texts.

Nowadays sensors and actuators are increasingly used in different spaces, creating intelligent environment. This article aims to describe a conceptualization of an intelligent environment and its operation, in order to check its consistency and its conformity. This conceptualization is done through an ontology representing the domain knowledge, whose elements will be instantiated from natural language texts describing the physical configuration of an intelligent environment and a scenario describing the operation desired by the user of the environment. We chose OWL to represent formally our environment augmented with SWRL rules to represent the dynamic aspect of the operation system and SQWRL to query our conceptual model. We show how consistency and conformity are checked thanks to this formalism.

No abstract

The development of a system is usually based on shared and accepted requirements. Hence, to be largely understood by the stakeholders, requirements are often written in natural language (NL). However, checking requirements completeness and consistency requires having them in a formal form. In this article, we focus on user requirements describing a system behaviour, i.e. its behavioural rules. We show how to transform behavioural rules identified from NL requirements and represented within an OWL ontology into the formal specification language Maude. The OWL ontology represents the generic behaviour of a system and allow us to bridge the gap between informal and formal languages and to automate the transformation of NL rules into a Maude specification.