We discuss a number of essential problems of software requirements engineering, related to management, organisations, users, stakeholders, methodology, tools, and education. Most of the problems seem to have their roots in how requirements engineering is appreciated at the business management and IT management levels.

NATURE is a collaborative basic research project on theories underlying requirements engineering funded by the ESPRIT III program of the European communities. Its goals are to develop a theory of knowledge representation that embraces subject, usage and development worlds surrounding the system, including expressive freedoms; a theory of domain engineering that facilitates the identification, acquisition and formalization of domain knowledge as well as similarity-based matching and classifying of software engineering knowledge; and a process engineering theory that promotes context and decision-based control of the development process. These theories are integrated and evaluated in a prototype environment constructed around an extended version of the conceptual modeling language Telos.>

A method for designing a conceptual schema (information model) for a data base is presented. The basic notion is that a conceptual schema is designed by collecting and integrating 'local' user information requirements and analysis of information inference relationships. The procedure consists of the following phases: 1) collection and specification of information requirements, 2) entity classification, 3) specification of functional dependencies, 4) abstract object specification, integration and analysis, 5) implied information analysis, 6) derivability (precedence) analysis and 7) transformation to an 'external-named-based' model. The phases are performed iteratively in a controlled fashion. Underlying theoretical concepts are defined and arguments presented for the method's practical applicability.