Dialogue act modelling: an approach to requirements analysis and specification of web-based information systems

Web-based information systems (WBIS) aim to support e-business using IT, World Wide Web, and internet and to be used online by anybody in anywhere of the world. The quality of user interfaces and navigation structures of WBIS is critical to attracting new users and keeping old users. This depends on how much the system developer understands what users want to see on the computer screen and how they want to communicate with the system interactively within business contexts. To elicit these details, WBIS modelling approaches need a focus on them in requirements analysis and represent them in system specification as a basis for designing user-friendly user interfaces and navigation structures. We regard these details as communicational requirements in distinction with functionalon-functional requirements in WBIS modelling. As existing IS modelling approaches were created only for traditional IS that simply focus on functional or non-functional requirements, they cannot be used to elicit and represent communicational requirements in WBIS analysis. This paper addressed this issue and proposes a dialogue act modelling approach that aims to eliciting and modelling communicational requirements for WBIS based on the Speech Theory in the social science.