=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1862/paper-13
|storemode=property
|title=An Ontology-Based Approach to Use Requirements Engineering in Portals of Transparency
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1862/paper-13.pdf
|volume=Vol-1862
|authors=Tainara L. Bernardi,Roberto dos Santos Rabello,Cristiano Roberto Cervi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ontobras/BernardiRC16
}}
==An Ontology-Based Approach to Use Requirements Engineering in Portals of Transparency==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1862/paper-13.pdf
An Ontology-Based Approach to Use Requirements
Engineering in Portals of Transparency
Tainara L. Bernardi, Roberto Dos Santos Rabello, Cristiano Roberto Cervi
Instituto de Ciências Exatas e Geociências – Universidade de Passo Fundo (UPF)
BR 285, São José – 99052-900 - Passo Fundo - RS - Brazil
tailbernardi@gmail.com, {rabello,cervi}@upf.br
Abstract. For information technology professionals can develop systems that assist in
governance and in meeting the obligations given by the legislation, they need to
understand the conceptual basis involved in the complex areas of the problems
experienced by local governments. The lack of standardized concepts complicates the
process and elicitation of validation requirements for the development of new software
systems.Given this reality, we present an ontology for bids and administrative contracts
and propose a form of application of this ontology in the activities of Requirements
Engineering. This will provide software engineers an alternative way to verify the
elicited requirements seeking to ensure that the software meets the needs of public
administration, as the obligations foreseen in law.
1. Introduction
With the rapid growth of urban centers and technological resources, the challenges faced
by public administrations increase significantly. This requires increasingly fast and
efficient actions in the use of information and communication technologies to ensure
constant interaction between government and citizens. To the needs and changing
obligations, there is the publication of government data on the Internet. For that
government actions can be developed with quality information systems that promote
communication between the public and government levels, they have become
indispensable.
One of the biggest challenges faced by software developers to the government
area is the complex and non-standard structures. This reality makes it difficult to
understand and build the necessary knowledge to solve government problems. With the
aim to facilitate the software development process and enable the understanding, sharing
and exchange of information between people, devices and computers, we understand
how important the definition of conceptual and structural patterns. From this
standardization, requirements engineers can minimize the difficulties encountered in the
process of knowledge of the problem domain, as they will have access to an organized
and documented conceptual framework that will facilitate the understanding of
definitions and concepts presented by professionals in the government area.
In this context, with the goal of facilitate the activities of requirements
engineering, we present a domain ontology for bids and administrative contracts.
This ontology aims to standardize the structure of the information, which is
essential and necessary for the understanding of the domain and the process for defining
software requirements in the municipal area. The application of ontology in
requirements engineering activities allow verification, analysis and the formulation of
144
suggestions for improvements in search of a definition of requirements concise and
consistent with the real needs and interests of the government and the population.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical framework
and related work. Section 3 describes the materials and methods used to build the
ontology and for the definition of the application process engineering requirements. The
final considerations are presented in Section 4.
2. Theoretical Background
In this section, we present the issues discussed in the literature review. For its
realization, we established the relationship between each subject studied and the purpose
of this work. Thus, we present the definitions, concepts and state of the art on Electronic
Government, Public Transparency, Ontology and Requirements Engineering and
discussed related work.
2.1. Electronic Government
Faced with the rapid growth of urban areas in recent times, many challenges have
emerged and many are yet to come, as the next two decades the cities of developing
countries concentrate 80% of the urban population of the planet (Leite & Awad, 2012).
This intense migration of population to urban areas is accompanied by great challenges
aimed at improving the organization and quality of life. The rapid process of
urbanization and the emerging population classes put enormous pressure on cities,
increased the demand for social services and benefits imposing complex fiscal,
institutional and political challenges. This pressure is directly related to municipal
government for being the first level of responsibility in the chain of implementation of
public policies (Macroplan, 2013). In this situation, it is expected that government
authorities and society know how to use the available resources wisely, intensively
exploring existing technologies and innovations in search of higher productivity and
quality of services.
In addition to innovations in information technology, infrastructure and urban
mobility, a number of achievements in recent years in the world are related to
governance. The government seeks the creation of mechanisms aimed at strengthening
the communication links with the population and can thus improve public management
through the implementation of information and communication technologies to build a
participatory and collaborative government (Leite & Awad, 2012). In this context, it
highlights the creation of technological means that integrate and bring together public
services and society, enabling public participation in monitoring management
(Macroplan, 2013). This was the purpose of the adoption of e-government, increase the
supply and improve the quality of available information and services to the society.
The current challenges are facing the development of an effective policy data
opening and stimulating citizen so that it realizes that technological resources used in
their daily life can be used as political tools, making it an active member of a
participatory government (Lemos, 2013). Competent, inclusive and transparent
government is more likely to be able to develop community interest projects and deploy
technologies that make it more intelligent. These characteristics favor the development
145
of a resilient administration, which is won with the empowerment of citizens to
participate in decision and planning your city together with government authorities.
The challenges that come with population growth beyond the limits of being
solved using only communication technologies, information and interaction. Require the
creation of computational solutions that fall within smart cities. One of computational
solutions used in several countries to strengthen the relationship between citizens and
government is the availability of government data in open formats on the Internet. This
enables the population to participate actively in public administration.
2.2. Public Transparency
As provided for in the Federal Constitution (Brasil, 1988) and Supplementary Law
number 131, published in May 2009, also known as the Transparency Law, the right of
every citizen to have access to government information, as is the obligation of the State
ensure this access through objective and timely, transparent, clear and easy to
understand language. Therefore, the creation of the Transparency Portal was one of the
solutions defined by the Brazilian government to improve the state of relations with
citizens, with enterprises and among government bodies. This is to improve the quality
of services rendered; promote interaction with business and industry; and strengthen
citizen participation through access to information, in building a more efficient and
effective administration (Araújo & Aguiar, 2014).
Despite the existence of specific legislation, some problems are worth
mentioning when it comes to government transparency: how the information is
presented to citizens, accessibility, heterogeneity of data format, temporality of
publication, inappropriate content to the user's profile, among others. Because
transparency portals may contain content from different government databases, there is
the concern with understanding the information published, which need to be organized
so that users understand its syntax and semantics. Much of the government data is
difficult to interpret for lay users and professionals in the computer area that use them as
a base for the development of information systems. The problems go beyond the
publication of the information required by law. They refer to the integration of
government services and citizens, covering methodologies, structuring and perceptions
used to organize and present information in population interest in transparency portals.
To cater the principles of transparency, a semantic organization of data is
required. In order for this to become reality, international government agencies have
sought to define standards to mitigate data integration issues published (Farinelli et al.,
2013).One of the policies proposed by the Brazilian government on e-government
interoperability standards shows that: to facilitate the crossing of data from different
sources of information, when its use by other member organizations of public
administration, by civil society or by citizen, they should be used resources such as
controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies and other methods of organization and
information retrieval (Brasil, 2015). As shown, ontologies have been described and
shown as solutions that contribute to standardization and the organizational structure
and semantics of government data to be made available to citizens.
Analyzing the bibliographic databases and studies, realize the contribution of
ontologies in the understanding of concepts and organization of knowledge. Therefore,
146
we emphasize the need and importance of consolidating a formal model of ontology for
the fields to be shown on transparency portals (Corrêa et al., 2015).However, present
domain ontologies to managers is not the best solution for most problems. We believe
that the ontologies should be known, understood and used by the teams developing
systems used in public administration and in providing information to citizens.
According to current legislation, there are several information to be published by the
municipal government. However, due to the breadth, scope of ontology modeled in this
study was limited to the areas of Bids and Administrative Contracts.
2.3. Ontologies
According to the W3C Consortium (W3C, 2015) ontology is understood as "the
definition of the terms used in the description and representation of an area of
knowledge." Briefly, ontologies should provide descriptions for the types of classes of
concepts / things in various fields of interest, relationships between these classes /
things, as well as properties / attributes that these classes / things must have (Breitman,
2005). Yet, the ontology is defined as an explicit specification of a conceptualization,
which is a simplified view of a knowledge domain (Corrêa et al., 2015).
One reason for the use of ontologies in computing is related to the sharing of
promise and common understanding of some domain of knowledge that can be
communicated between people and computers. Thus, ontologies have been developed to
facilitate the sharing and reuse of information (Breitman & Leite, 2004), in addition to
clarifying the structure of knowledge, promoting a shared understanding of the area in
question. In the context accosted by the study, ontology is defined as a computational
device consisting of a vocabulary of concepts, their definitions and their properties. A
graphical model that shows the possible relationships between concepts and a set of
axioms that constrain the interpretation of these concepts and their relationships,
representing the knowledge of the bidding field and administrative contracts clearly and
unambiguously.
2.4. Requirements Engineering
The Requirements Engineering is an important area of software engineering, defined as
the stage for the delimitation of the software context. This step is the recognition and
modeling of the problem domain and the definition of the fundamental requirements for
the system to be developed. During this step, the requirements engineer work together to
stakeholders (customers and end users), seeking to recognize, analyze, synthesize,
model, specify and validate the requirements.
This work devotes special attention to the following activities of the engineering
requirements, based on (Sommerville, 2011):
Requirements Elicitation: activity where software engineers work with
customers and end users of the system to get information and understand the
application domain, the services to be offered, system performance, restrictions
and other important information;
Requirements Validation: conference process where they are checked if the
elicited requirements define the system as per the requirements presented by the
client.
147
The results of the engineering requirements of the process is a robust key
documentation requirements in all subsequent stages of the software development
process. Therefore, use ontologies in the process of knowledge and understanding of the
problem domain is a way to minimize excessive effort demanded in the elicitation
activity. In this case, the ontology is used as a means of standardized presentation of
clear and scope accosted, avoiding the erroneous setting requirements for lack of
knowledge of the context.
2.5. Related Works
There are several studies related to the modeling of ontologies in the governmental area,
and there are studies on the use of ontologies in Requirements Engineering. In the
governmental area, domain ontologies are used as a form of standardization and
presentation of a problem domain. In Requirement Engineering domain ontologies
establish a common understanding between the parties involved, allowing better
communication in the pursuit of elicitation and most complete analysis possible for the
requirements of the systems (Zapata et al., 2010).
In ontoGov project (Apostolou et al., 2005), the team used semantic web
technologies to build ontologies that represent the meaning of the processed data,
features and functionality coming from the services of e-government. Is a platform that
facilitates composition, configuration and evolution of services in order to offer the
government a vision of service configuration models and improve services to users.
Recently (Amina Adadi, 2015) presented an ontology related to public
administration domain, called WebGov. The same is intended to provide a global
knowledge model of implementation of the administrative services provided by the
government, in order that it be used in the development of electronic services.
In 2006 (Kaiya & Saeki, 2006) presented a method of requirements gathering
called ORE (Ontology-based Requirements Elicitation), which suggests that ontologies
are used in the field of knowledge they contain semantic rules that give meaning to
requirements of sentences . Thus, when using rules of inference can find out what
requirements must be added or deleted to ensure completeness and consistency. In this
method, the concepts and relationships modeled in the domain ontology allow, through
an analysis formula, check the quality of elicited requirements outside his correctitude,
completeness, consistency and ambiguity.
In 2007 Zong-Yong et al. (2007) proposed a framework based on KADS
knowledge modeling (Knowledge Aided Design System), which uses multiple
ontologies for lifting requirements. The structure combines foundational ontologies,
domain ontology and task ontology in a metamodel to organize and standardize the
assessment process requirements.
Given the above, the existence of a domain ontology to be used in the
engineering of transparency portals requirements or other systems related to
procurement and administrative contracts is a way to minimize human efforts. In
addition, insert the reuse approach, allowing the ontology to be reused as a means of
presentation and formalization of the context in various other software related projects
modeled domain.
148
3. Materials and Methods
We divided the study in three phases, each with specific activities involving studies,
research, ontology construction and definition of ontology application process
engineering of government transparency portals requirements. The Following are each
work phases.
3.1. Analysis and Specification
The activities developed in the first phase of work sought to understand the complexity
of the information used in the context of public management, directing the focus of
study for the area of procurement and administrative contracts. The choice of this area
considered the complexity of the concepts involved, the lack of structural
standardization of information and the importance of these topics to society, considering
that they are part of municipal financial management. We sought to identify the
problems that can be solved or minimized by the use of ontology in requirements
engineering process.
After the study and construction of the necessary knowledge about the problem
domain, the process of verification and search of information to be modeled as concepts,
properties and relationships in the ontology started. This activity considered the
recommended transparency standards by the Brazilian government and the requirements
presented in the current legislation in the country.
3.2. The Ontology
The activities d The second phase of work includes the definition of the methodology to
be used in the construction of ontology, the choice of language and editing tool, the
conceptual definition and relationship to be modeled in addition to the actual
construction and documentation of the domain ontology.
3.2.1 Methodology and Tools
Due to the existence of various forms of ontology construction, the first step of this
stage was the study of the most commonly used methodologies in order to identify the
most appropriate method to be used in this work. The following methodologies were
analyzed: Cyc, Uschold, TOVE, Methontology, NeOn, Methodology 101. Upon
completion of the analysis, it was decided to use the Ontology Development 101
methodology. The choice was based on its simplicity and the details presented for each
work step. As (Isotani & Bittencourt, 2015), the method presents an iterative approach
and describes in detail the steps that guide the work of those involved.
Further, there was the choice of tool to be used. Second (Isotani & Bittencourt,
2015) the most popular are: Apollo, OntoStudio, Protégé and TopBraid Composer,
among others. Analyzed the editors, the Protégé is one of the most known and used by
the international community, is open source and free. Also, another important and
decisive factor in choosing the editor is the fact that the Ontology Development 101
method has a close relationship with the tool (Noy & McGuinness, 2001).
149
The choice of implementation language complete the requirements needed to
start construction of the ontology. Among the languages recommended by W3C1 (W3C,
2015), highlight the RDF and OWL. OWL is recommended because it is suitable for
situations where information needs to be processed and interpreted by the machine, as
well as having easy to express meanings and semantics. Thus, OWL was adopted as the
ontology language development.
3.2.2 Construction of Ontology
After defining the concepts, properties, relationships and semantic rules to be modeled
in the ontology, has started the process of building it in the Protégé tool. During the
modeling process, it was emphasized the inclusion of details and descriptions of each
concept, attribute and relationship, thereby building documentation. This documentation
will be important for understanding and building the knowledge base represented by
domain ontology. Figure 1 shows one form of graphical display of the modeled ontology
classes.
Figure 1. Ontology for bids and administrative contracts.
3.3. Application of Ontology
Ontology proposal will be applied as exemplification process of its use in the elicitation
activities and validation requirements. The modeling and documentation will be used as
a means of standardizing knowledge, providing professional computing area the
understanding necessary to maintain clear communication with stakeholders.
Based on the concepts and the submitted information, software engineers will
make the process for defining a new system requirements. They should relate each
requirement to one or more concepts in the ontology, as the similarity between them.
1
http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ontology
150
Through the process relationships, it will be possible to identify the concepts that are not
covered by the requirements set, indicating that they may be incomplete, or even the
need to define new requirements for the system. On the other hand, the existence of
concepts that have many relationships can alert ambiguities. The ontology will allow
requirements engineers make these assessments, because not always the application of
elicitation techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, meetings are sufficient to
capture all the conditions required for the development of a good information system.
Through the process of comparison made between the terms of ontology and the
requirements already elicited in order to validate them, we seek to ensure that the portal
of transparency meets the needs of citizens and obligatoriness under the laws. The
process of using the ontology engineering requirements should submit suggestions for
improvements to be made in the requirements. As an example, the existence of terms
that are mandatory in the field and are not covered by the requirements set; the presence
of ambiguous requirements, which can directly affect the quality of the information
provided; the existence of confusing definitions and wrong relationships between
requirements; and enables engineers to make other analysis using the structure modeled
by the ontology. The comparison of terms proposed in the first instance, be performed
manually using the graphical visualization of the ontology to relate the concepts and
elicited requirements.
With the completion of the use of ontology engineering requirements, a report
with the test results and the suggestions for improvement given the document of official
requirements of the new system will be developed. The application processes the
ontology elicitation and validation requirements are shown in Figure 2.
151
Figure2. Ontology application in elicitation and validation requirements.
To confirm the expectations of the proposed process, a software development
team must implement the modules of bids and administrative contracts a portal of
municipal transparency. During this development, the team will report all experienced
situations, and at the end of the process, must present a descriptive report with the
observations made during the execution of each of the activities of engineering
requirements. This report will present evidence to confirm the benefits observed during
the ontology application process.
5. Final Considerations
This work presents an ontology-based approach to the elicitation of requirements on
transparency portals. With the use of the proposed approach is expected to confirm
expectations that the ontology will solve many of the problems faced by professionals in
the Requirements Engineering area. They will have the opportunity to meet the
152
modeling domain, facilitating the activities of elicitation and validation requirements for
the development of municipal transparency portals or other useful software for public
management.
Ontology has presented a standardization and semantic organization of
information of bids and administrative contracts, which will enable interoperability of
transparency portals with other information systems and other government databases.
The built ontology will be available in specific libraries, allowing other professionals to
reuse, enhance or complement.
This project does not end with the approach proposed in this work, because our
goal is that the ontology can add new concepts, as well as the development of new
ontologies that include other areas related to public transparency.
References
Amina Adadi, M.B.D.C., 2015. Ontology based composition of e-Government services
using AI Planning. In 2015 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems:
Theories and Applications (SITA). Rabat, 2015. IEEE.
Apostolou, D. et al., 2005. Configuring E-Government Services Using Ontologies. In
5th IFIP Conference e-Commerce, e-Business, and e-Government (I3E’2005).
Poznan, Poland, 2005. Springer.
Araújo, D.B. & Aguiar, E.L., 2014. Dados governamentais abertos como ferramenta de
participação social e aproximação entre governo e sociedade. In CONSAD -
Congresso Brasileiro de Gestão Pública. Brasília, 2014.
Brasil, P.d.R., 1988. Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988. [Online]
Available at: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constituicao.htm
[Accessed 02 Junho 2015].
Brasil, M.d.P.O.e.G., 2015. Padrões de Interoperabilidade de Governo Eletrônico -
ePING - Versão 2015. [Online] Available at: http://eping.governoeletronico.gov.br/
[Accessed 25 Junho 2015].
Breitman, K.K., 2005. Web semântica: a internet do futuro. Rio de Janeiro: LCT.
Breitman, K.K. & Leite, J.C.S.d.P., 2004. Ontologias - Como e porque criá-las. In Anais
do SBC. Rio de Janeiro, 2004.
Corrêa, A.S., Borba, C., Silva, D.L.D. & Corrêa, P., 2015. A Fuzzy Ontology-Driven
Approach to Semantic Interoperability in e-Government Big Data. International
Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 5(2), pp.178-81.
Farinelli, F., Melo, S. & Almeida, M.B., 2013. O papel das Ontologias na
Interoperabilidade de Sistemas de Informação: Reflexões na Esfera Governamental.
In XIV Encontro Nacional de Pesquisa em Ciência da Informação. Florianópolis,
2013. (Comunicação Oral).
Isotani, S. & Bittencourt, I.I., 2015. Dados Abertos Conectados. São Paulo: Novatec.
Kaiya, H. & Saeki, M., 2006. Using Domain Ontology as Domain Knowledge for
Requirements Elicitation. In 4th IEEE International Requirements Engineering
Conference., 2006.
153
Leite, C. & Awad, J.D.C.M., 2012. Cidades sustentáveis, cidades inteligentes:
desenvolvimento sustentável num planeta urbano. Porto Alegre: Bookman.
Lemos, A., 2013. Cidades inteligentes. GV-Executivo, 12(2), pp.46-49.
Macroplan, 2013. Desafios da Gestão Municipal 2013. [Online] Available at:
http://www.macroplan.com.br/Documentos/EstudoMacroplan20131021163811.pdf
[Accessed 26 abril 2015].
Noy, N.F. & McGuinness, D.L., 2001. Ontology Development 101. Available at:
http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Ontology101 [Accessed 25 Abril 2015].
Sommerville, I., 2011. Engenharia de Software. 9th ed. São Paulo: Pearson Prentice
Hall.
W3C, 2015. Publicações do W3C Brasil. Available at:
http://www.w3c.br/Materiais/PublicacoesW3C [Accessed 03 Junho 2015].
Zapata, C.M., Giraldo, G.L. & Mesa, J.E., 2010. Una Propuesta de Metaontología para
la Educción de Requisitos. Ingeniare. Revista chilena de ingeniería, 18(1), pp.26-37.
Zong-Yong, L. et al., 2007. Towards a Multiple Ontology Framework for Requirements
Elicitation and Reuse. In 31st Annual International Computer Software and
Applications Conference(COMPSAC 2007)., 2007. IEEE Computer Society.
154