Description-Logic-Based Feature Modeling and Verification

The feature model has been widely adopted as a domain requirements capturing model by most of the current domain engineering methods. But these methods lack the semantic description of the feature model and the relationship between features. This has led to the redundancy and confusion in feature model representation between different domain engineering methods. In this paper, a semantic feature model, including feature classes, relationships and constraints among features, is presented based on description logic. Rules for mutex, requirements and conflict constraints are proposed, which are used to verify the consistency and completeness of feature model instances. Then, in the light of a real software domain, the modeling process of the feature model with description logic and its verification are discussed systematically: 1)Ontology editor Protege is used to depict the feature meta-model and models; 2)Rules are described with rule language; 3)Description logic reasoner and query language SPARQL are adopted for consistency and completeness verification. Feature meta-model and rules are domain independent, whereas feature models (that is, the instances of meta-model) are domain dependent, which requires experience of domain experts. This approach will be beneficial to semantic modeling of domain feature models (that is, reduce the inconsistency among different feature modeling methods) and their verification.