Requirement formalization using OWL ontology-based Zachman Framework

Understanding user requirements is critical to the success of developing and implementing systems. Consequently, the user requirements should be formalized in a systematic way. Zachman Framework is an enterprise architecture framework that provides a formal and highly structured way of viewing and defining an enterprise; it can provide a systematic way to formalize the requirements. However, there exist some difficulties in applying Zachman Framework: 1) no relationship among six cells; 2) no recommended procedure; and 3) no consistent modeling method. To address these difficulties, this paper implements Zachman Framework using OWL ontology. The proposed approach presents overall procedure and details ontology modeling in Protege OWL. We demonstrated the OWL ontology-based Zachman Framework by applying it to formalizing requirements of a sustainability assessment testbed.