Towards an approach to elicit domain requirements from social networks: the case of emergency systems

The¹ growth of social networks impacts on several areas of our society. They can be used during software development, more specifically in the requirements elicitation activity, for identifying, complementing and validating the domain requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach that shows how social networks can be used as a source for capturing domain requirements. The aim is to perform the initial modeling of the system domain, providing a systematic methodology (process) for rapidly capturing relevant features that would not be straightforwardly elicited using traditional approaches. We apply this approach to the emergency systems domain (more specifically, floods in coastal areas), extracting information from the Twitter social network. The result is a domain model whose features can be reused in several applications of that domain. The application of the approach has been evaluated for its usefulness by domain experts and replicated to verify the generation of similar results at different time periods.