A formal approach for generating oo specifications from natural language

The requirements analysis process is essential to software development. The success or failure of a software system can be said to largely depend on t he quality of this activity. A formal and disciplined process is therefore necessary for requirements analysis. In this paper, we present an approach that is based on the formal definition of relations between linguistic and OO conceptual structures as a basis for a formal and disciplined problem an alysis process. This process is based on two components, conceptual model f ormalization and OO model construction. The first provides formal rules to identify the key components of conceptual models, and the second, provides a set of definite steps to guide the analyst in model construction. We also present some conclusions concerning the application of our approach versus the standard OMT approach by a group of students at our university. (C) 19 99 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.