Development of tooling to support fact-oriented modeling at ESA

Abstract

Developing space systems implies complex activities involving many parties who are widely distributed in location and time. Such development therefore requires efficient and effective information exchange during the complete lifecycle of the space system. This can only be achieved by realizing semantic interoperability between all involved parties. Semantic interoperability can be achieved if the applications involved share a set of conceptual definitions. To achieve this goal, the concept of a global conceptual model that has the potential to embrace the complete lifecycle of a space system is analyzed. Realizing the full potential of this approach requires methods and tools not only to support the formal specification of such a conceptual model and their tailoring for producing application specific conceptual models, but also to support the development or adaptation of applications resulting in needs to support the 3-level data model hierarchy and the ability to specify domain-specific conceptual models based on the global conceptual model. This paper describes the tools that are under development to support the above described objectives. © Springer-Verlag 2009.