OpenReq Ontology
18.2.2019
OpenReq Ontology
The most practical need is to enable the interoperability of the different microservices in the OpenReq infrastructure.
OpenReq is a project that aims to provide better requirements engineering to organisations. The project covers the domain of requirements engineering over the entire life cycle of requirements from requirements identification to release planning.
The OpenReq partners are creating an open infrastructure for requirements engineering activities. As a part of this infrastructure, the common ontology serves the interoperability between microservices included in the platform, specification of external interfaces or APIs, and define the core data in the platform. The most practical need is to enable the interoperability of the different microservices in the OpenReq infrastructure. All interfaces currently rely only on JSON.
It is important that external services, including the OpenReq trials and the OpenReq open call participants, can have access to the OpenReq infrastructure using stable, standardised data on the interfaces. Another important aspect is to agree on what concepts and data is managed in the OpenReq infrastructure even to the extent that data should follow a relatively similar structure adhering to the ontology in different microservices.
The creation of the ontology has been a co-creative and iterative process in which ontology has emerged from key requirements engineering concepts and is adapted to the practical needs of the microservices. The ontology defines the key concepts and their relationships and is summarised in the UML Class diagram of the OpenReq ontology (below).
OpenReq JSON schema is defined in the Github.
