Metamodeling the Requirements of Web Systems

A detailed requirements analysis is best practice in the development of traditional software. Conversely, the importance of requirements engineering for Web systems is still underestimated. Only few Web methodologies provide an approach for the elicitation of requirements and techniques for their specifi-cation. This paper focuses on specification through requirements models of Web systems. We present a metamodel, which contains the key concepts needed for the requirements specification of Web systems. The benefit of such a metamodel is twofold: (1) The key concepts are used for the definition of a common modeling language: a UML profile for Web requirements. (2) The elements of the metamodel are mapped to the modeling constructs of the differ-ent Web methodologies. In this way the prerequisite for model-to-model trans-formations is given, which allows to build different views of the requirements of a Web system using different Web methodologies.