Understanding concerns with ontologies

Concern orientation gives us methodological tools for managing the system complexity. Separation of concerns in the aspect oriented software development (AOSD) allows architects to structure and developers to better manage complex systems by mapping the whole system in a multi-concern space and focusing one problem at a time. Certainly, there is a lot of confusion in AOSD about what a concern is. In this context, we defined as more precisely as possible the concern concept in information engineering. From our point of view, a concern is a care of one or more stakeholders involved in the construction or evolution of an information system in its natural environment. In order to make accurate the meaning of the concern concept, in this paper we introduce CONO (CONcerns Ontology), an ontology of the concern concept, which formally describes its meaning as we gave in our definition. Each concern might be described by its high-level specification that is a description formed by the problem specification of the concern and the roles of the stakeholders, which have that concern. The concepts from the high-level specifications constitute the stakeholders' vocabulary and can be used in the construction of an ontology of the new information system.