Robust requirements gathering for ontologies in smart water systems

Urban environments are urgently required to become smarter to overcome sustainability and resilience challenges whilst remaining economically viable. This involves a vast increase in the penetration of ICT resources, both physical and virtual, with the requirement to factor in built environment, socio-economic and human artefacts. This paper, therefore, proposes a methodology for eliciting, testing, and deploying, requirements in the field of urban cybernetics. This extends best practice requirements engineering principles to meet the demands of this growing niche. The paper follows a case study approach of applying the methodology in the smart water domain, where it achieves positive results. The approach not only heavily utilises iteration alongside domain experts, but also mandates the integration of technical domain experts to ensure software requirements are met. A key novelty of the approach is prioritising a balance between (a) knowledge engineers’ tenacity for logical accuracy, (b) software engineers’ need for speed, simplicity, and integration with other components, and (c) the domain experts’ needs to invoke ownership and hence nurture adoption of the resulting ontology.