Using OWL Ontologies as a Domain-Specific Language for Capturing Requirements for Formal Analysis and Test Case Generation

Our experience at GE Research suggests that the use of a controlled-English grammar and a rich authoring environment can greatly facilitate subject matter experts' ability to understand, create, and collaboratively employ models. A domain ontology is an ideal foundation for many advanced capabilities. An example is extending our controlled-English grammar and authoring environment for OWL model generation to allow the capture of high-level requirements, assumptions, and assertions, enabling requirement engineers to create models of system capability and behavior amenable to formal methods analysis to detect incompleteness, conflict, and a variety of other issues. The same domain models and formal requirements can be used to automatically generate test cases and test procedures. Automated test generation represents a huge reduction in the time and effort required to create and validate critical software. In this paper we illustrate how ontologies enable the ASSERT™ tool suite to support the above capabilities through a small grounding use case.