Multi-perspective Ontology to Understand Organizational Requirements

Requirements elicitation is a collaborative process that needs both domain and system experts´ attention to deal human and organizational aspects. Collaboration helps to build shared understanding about a system´s environment or contextual situation where a new information system intends to be a part. Lack of structured organizational knowledge representation and in depth understanding of organizational situation that includes both hard and soft system aspects, leads to poor requirements specification. In this paper, based on a conceptual model of an organization, a multi-perspective ontology is proposed to structure organizational knowledge. As a result, it facilitates expert-user collaboration and assist experts to understand contextual requirements. Empirical findings are examined to nurture the proposed ontology. The results, obtained in a case study, are encouraging to make use of the ontology.