Ontological approach to improving design quality

The creation of quality software depends on the existence of a quality software design. In particular, it is important to identify inconsistencies that might be injected at the design level. We have developed a common ontology that integrates software specification knowledge and software design knowledge in order to facilitate the interoperability of formal requirements modeling tools and software design tools with the end goal of detecting errors in software designs. Our approach focuses initially on the integration of unified modeling language (UML) with the formal requirements modeling language, knowledge acquisition in automated specification (KAOS), in order to help automate the detection of inconsistencies in UML designs thereby enhancing the quality of the original design and ultimately integrating the multiple views inherent in UML. We demonstrate the integration of UML and KAOS with an elevator system case study