Mapping design knowledge from multiple representations

The requirements and specifications documents which initiate and control design and development projects typically use a variety of formal and informal notational systems. The goal of the research reported is to automatically interpret requirement documents expressed in a variety of notations and to integrate the interpretations in order to support requirements analysis and synthesis from them. Because the source notations include natural language, a form of semantic net called conceptual graphs is adopted as the intermediate knowledge representation for expressing interpretations and integrating them. The focus is to describe the interpretation or mapping of a few requirements notations to conceptual graphs, and to indicate the process of joining these interpretations