From Use Case Model to Service Model: An Environment Ontology Based Approach

One fundamental problem in services computing is how to bridge the gap between business requirements and various heterogeneous IT services. This involves eliciting business requirements and building a solution accordingly by reusing available services. While the business requirements are commonly elicited through use cases and scenarios, it is not straightforward to transform the use case model into a service model, and the existing manual approach is cumbersome and error-prone. In this paper, the environment ontology, which is used to model the problem space, is utilized to facilitate the model transformation process. The environment ontology provides a common understanding between business analysts and software engineers. The required software functionalities as well as the available services' capabilities are described using this ontology. By semi-automatically matching the required capability of each use case to the available capabilities provides by services, a use case is realized by that set of services. At the end of this paper, a fictitious case study was used to illustrate how this approach works.