A Template-Based Analysis of GRL

Abstract

This chapter applies the template proposed by Opdahl and Henderson-Sellers to the Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering Language (GRL). It proposes a metamodel of GRL that identifies the constructs of the language and the links between them. Each construct is then described through the template in order to extract and formalise detailed syntactic and semantic information. The latter takes the form of a mapping between a construct and its meaning, defined in terms of the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. Evaluations of both GRL and the template are provided as well as suggestions for improvements. The purpose of our work is to improve the quality of goal modelling. Indeed, despite the increasing popularity of the goal-oriented paradigm, especially in requirements engineering and enterprise modelling, the central notion of goal remains one of the most controversial. A possible cause might be that researchers have devoted too little attention to studying the ontological foundations of goal-oriented languages. This chapter addresses such issues for GRL.

User Requirements Notation: The First Ten Years, The Next Ten Years (Invited Paper)

“…There is no formal semantics for GRL at this point. However, the initial description of GRL [126], which did not include a meta-model at the time, was evaluated by Heymans et al [95] from an ontological perspective. Some of their conclusions were actually taken into consideration in the definition of the URN metamodel.…”