Providing Foundation for User Feedback Concepts by Extending a Communication Ontology

The term user feedback is becoming widely used in requirements engineering (RE) research to refer to the comments and evaluations that users express upon having experienced the use of a software application or service. This explicit feedback takes place in virtual spaces (e.g., issue tracking systems, app stores), aiming, for instance, at reporting on discovered bugs or requesting new features. Founding the notion of explicit user feedback with the use of an ontology may support a deep understanding of the feedback nature, as well as contribute to the development of tool-components for its analysis at use of requirements analysts. In this paper, we present a user feedback ontology as an extension of an existing communication ontology. We describe how we built it, along with a set of competency questions, and illustrate its applicability on an example taken from a collaborative communication related to RE for software evolution.