Extensions to Some AOSE Methodologies

This paper looks into areas not covered by prominent Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies. Extensive paper review led to the identification of two issues, first most of these methodologies almost neglect semantic web and ontology. Second, as expected, each one has its strength and weakness and may focus on some phases of the development lifecycle but not all of the phases. The work presented here builds extensions to a highly regarded AOSE methodology (MaSE) in order to cover the areas that this methodology does not concentrate on. The extensions include introducing an ontology stage for semantic representation and integrating early requirement specification from a methodology which mainly focuses on that. The integration involved developing transformation rules (with the necessary handling of nonmatching notions) between the two sets of representations and building the software which automates the transformation. The application of this integration on a case study is also presented in the paper. The main flow of MaSE stages was changed to smoothly accommodate the new additions.