Ontology for quality specification in requirements engineering

he field of Requirements Engineering (RE) is arguably one of the most crucial areas in the development of systems in support of organisational structures and processes. Eliciting, negotiating, analysing and validating are RE processes that rely on appropriate abstraction mechanisms. This paper focuses on a specific modelling approach, that of Business Process Modelling (BPM), and the use of a specific ontology for modelling and evaluating quality aspects of business processes. This business process ontology provides an explicit specification of the shared conceptualization and understanding of enterprises between IT and none-IT experts. Specification and measurement of requirements based on an ontology fosters communication between experts. This paper proposes an approach that drives specification and measurement of quality requirements. Application of the proposed approach is illustrated for a simplified version of a business process.