Requirements engineering domain knowledge in information technology

This research is concerned with identifying and defining domain knowledge obtained during requirements engineering, we term “Requirements Engineering Domain Knowledge”. Further, we claim that, with a clear definition of this domain knowledge, and with an understanding of the way it affects information systems implementation, we can develop ways to improve development processes so that Requirements Engineering Domain Knowledge can be utilized in other contexts.

The definition of a scope for domain knowledge, the definition of its content, and the suggestion of methods for its representation. Using the results of this research, domain knowledge embedded in code can potentially be utilized in contexts other than IS development.

Since the introduction of IT in organizations, organizations have gradually become increasingly dependent on it. Business rules and knowledge about the domain, which used to be possessed by individuals, are nowadays often encoded in the organization's information systems. However, the encoded knowledge generally referred to as “domain knowledge”. Since its scope and definition is not very clear, and since it is often “hidden” in the code, this knowledge is not readily accessible as a source of knowledge. Extracting domain knowledge from code requires programming knowledge as well as a deep understanding of the software and might not be practically possible even then.

The objective of this research is to develop ways that will advance our ability to explicitly represent domain knowledge gathered during the development processes. Such representation of gathered domain knowledge can be used to support explicit representation in system code so that this domain knowledge will be easier to extract.