An automated ontology generation technique for an emergent behavior detection system

Due to the lack of central control in distributed systems, design and implementation of such systems is a challenging task. Interaction of multiple autonomous components can easily result in unwanted behavior in the system. Therefore it is vital to carefully review the design of distributed systems. Manual review of software documents is too inefficient and error prone. It would therefore be beneficial to have a systematic methodology to automatically analyze software requirements and design documents. However automating the process of software analysis is a challenging task because besides the design know-how, each software system requires its own domain knowledge. Existing approaches often require a great deal of input from system engineers familiar with the domain. Such information needs to be interpreted by the designer which is a time-consuming and error prone process. This research suggests the use of a scenario-based approach to represent system requirements. Scenarios are often depicted using message sequence charts (MSCs). Due to their formal notation, MSCs can be used to analyze software requirements in a systematic manner. In an earlier paper, it was demonstrated that ontologies can be used to effectively automate the construction of domain knowledge for the system. However the construction of ontologies remained a challenging task. This paper describes a process which infers ontology from the provided message sequence charts. Furthermore this paper introduces a software tool which automates the process of domain ontology construction. This methodology is demonstrated using a case study of a fleet-management software system.