{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,7]],"date-time":"2026-02-07T20:36:45Z","timestamp":1770496605815,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"6","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,11]],"date-time":"2023-06-11T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1686441600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"University of South Africa (Unisa)"},{"name":"Unisa research professor fund"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Systems"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Semi-formal software techniques have been very successful in industry, government institutions and other areas such as academia. Arguably, they owe a large part of their success to their graphical notation, which is more human-oriented than their counterpart text-based and formal notation techniques. However, ensuring the consistency between two or more models is one of the known challenges of these techniques. This work looks closely at the specific case of the User Requirements Notation (URN) technique. Although the abstract model of URN provides for link elements to ensure the consistency between its two main components, namely, Goal-Oriented Requirement Language (GRL) and Use Case Maps (UCM), the effective implementation of such links is yet to be fully addressed. This paper performs a detailed analysis of the existing URN models construction process and proposes an improved process with some guidelines to ensure, by construction, the correctness and consistency of the GRL and UCM models. A case study is used throughout the paper to illustrate the suggested solution.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/systems11060301","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,12]],"date-time":"2023-06-12T03:37:23Z","timestamp":1686541043000},"page":"301","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["An Improved User Requirements Notation (URN) Models\u2019 Construction Approach"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"11","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3139-6576","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Cyrille","family":"Dongmo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), Science Campus, University of South Africa (Unisa), Johannesburg 1709, South Africa"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6557-7749","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"John Andrew","family":"Van der Poll","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Digital Transformation and Innovation, Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL), Midrand Campus, University of South Africa (Unisa), Midrand 1686, South Africa"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,11]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e2481","DOI":"10.1002\/smr.2481","article-title":"Can non-developers learn a simplified modeling notation quickly?","volume":"34","year":"2022","journal-title":"J. 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