Core Ontology Usability: From a Formalized Knowledge Base to the Development of a System of Systems Domain Understanding

This paper describes the step-by-step processes towards the formalization of a core ontology for missions and capabilities in a system of systems, and the development of a specific SoS domain ontology from the formalized ontology. The study adopts the SABIOx methodology to trace the different aspects of the ontology development process from requirements, setup, capture, design, and implementation phases. This study also demonstrates the core ontology’s usability and reusability. Usability refers to its adequacy for specific use as a reference point for SoS knowledge exploration for development and operational purposes. Reusability refers to adequacy for several uses, such as facilitating the understanding of different domain-specific systems of systems. This is done in three steps: formalization of the core ontology, exploration of the usefulness of this formalization, and development of a domain ontology from the core ontology. These result in: the application of ontology tools to demonstrate the machine readability, inferences, and possibilities to querying the ontology knowledge base; the incorporation of systematic ontology development processes; and testing of the core knowledge with a domain prompt. An alignment of these aspects provides different points of view of how an SoS can be formulated, how the concepts collectively describe the development of an SoS emergent behavior, and how the ontology knowledge base can be explored to support decision frameworks guiding an SoS.