Ontology-Based Feature Modeling and Application-Oriented Tailoring

Feature models have been widely adopted in domain requirements capturing and specifying. However, there are still difficulties remaining in domain model validating and application-oriented tailoring. These difficulties are partly due to the missing of a strictly defined feature meta-model, which makes it difficult to formally represent the feature models. Aiming at the problem, we propose an ontology-based feature modeling method supporting application-oriented tailoring. In this method features are classified into several categories and are all precisely defined in the OWL-based meta-model. Expression capacity of the feature model can be greatly improved due to the rich types of features. On the other hand the feature model can be easily converted into ontology model and be validated through ontology inference. Application-oriented tailoring can also gain support from the reasoning-based guidance. Finally, advantages of ontology-based feature modeling, especially for component and architecture design, are discussed with our conclusions.