Formal Rule Representation and Verification from Natural Language Requirements Using an Ontology

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.

REX: General-Purpose CNL with Code Generation Support

“…This enables, in particular, code generation, automated verification, early validation, and in the end, reduced time-to-market. A requirements specification written in a CNL can be compiled into a formal model that can be verified to prove that there are no contradictions, that invariants are not violated, and more [2,3,[7][8][9][10]. Similarly, a requirements specification can be compiled into prototypes or mockups, or ideally, into runtime or production code, which can be delivered to QA as well as to end-users, enabling the realization of the requirements to be tested and validated in practice as soon as possible.…”

Représentation et vérification d’un environnement intelligent à partir de spécifications utilisateur en langage naturel

“…Ce mode de transformation a l'avantage de ne pas se conformer à la syntaxe des langages qui peut être amenée à évoluer, ou même se décliner sous plusieurs versions. Cette transformation est détaillée dans (Sadoun et al, 2014). La figure 9 illustre la règle de réécriture RR-1 créée à partir de la règle utilisateur RU-1 (cf.…”