Towards Conceptual Foundations of Requirements Engineering for Services

A service-oriented system should be engineered to satisfy the requirements of its stakeholders. Requirements are understood in terms of stakeholder goals, softgoals, quality constraints, preferences, tasks, and domain assumptions. The service-oriented system is viewed in terms of services, mediators, choreographies, and orchestrations, among others. To engineer the system according to requirements, it is necessary to translate the requirements into the model of the service-oriented system. To do so, we must know the relations between the conceptualization of requirements and the conceptualization of services. Towards this aim, we propose and discuss relations between the Core Ontology for Requirements and the Web Service Modeling Ontology. We formalize both ontologies in a description logic and relate them via bridge rules in a distributed description logic. The two ontologies and the bridge rules together form conceptual foundations on which to build methodologies for the requirements engineering of service-oriented systems.