Towards a reusable unified basis for representing business domain knowledge and development artifacts in systems engineering

Abstract

During the systems engineering process many heterogeneous artifacts which belong to different engineering disciplines and describe different views upon the product to be developed are produced. In order to integrate these artifacts, to increase the level of reuse, or to evaluate and implement changes, we need semantically rich relations between development artifacts and the parts of the product they describe. In this paper, we present our research to extend the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology with a mid-level layer which can be used as a reusable semantic basis for making the knowledge about the developed product, the development artifacts, and the relations between them explicit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.