Ontology for Systems Development

Abstract

Software-intensive information systems have a major impact on our lives, both privately and professionally. Development of these systems is a complex activity that requires the involvement of people with di®erent competences and skills. Even though software-intensive systems have been developed since the 1960s, the success rate is still low. A major hindrance to successful system development projects is the lack of consistent terminology. Since systems development is a collaborative activity, involving not only systems developers but also domain experts and user representatives, the understanding of each other is a prerequisite for an e®ective collaboration. The aim of this paper is to explore and present de¯nitions, dependencies, and relationships of the most fundamental concepts in systems development in the form of an ontology. The ontology consists of four categories of concepts: General concepts, Description concepts, Realization concepts, and Appearance concepts. The two core concepts in the ontology are Systems and Systems development.

Ontology Learning for Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge

“…A quarter of these failures arise during the design phase of a system, which can be traced back to a lack of efficient collaborations between parties involved in the system life cycle processes. According to Hallberg et al (2014), there is no unambiguous and comprehensive use of concepts in the field of systems development. This causes misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and irritations in the development of systems, in the most severe cases inhibiting the functioning and usability of the emerging system.…”

“…However, ontology-based SE (OBSE) is still in its infancy. Despite the fact that several ontologies have been created for solving particular SE problems (Engel et al, 2018;Givehchi et al, 2017;Hallberg et al, 2014), there is a lack of mature and formal ontologies for depicting the entire SE body of knowledge (Adcock et al, 2016;Di Maio, 2010;Martin et al, 2013).…”

“…• There still lacks a cohesive knowledge representation to conceptualize the entire SE body of knowledge (Adcock et al, 2016;Di Maio, 2010;Hallberg et al, 2014;Martin et al, 2013;van Ruijven, 2013;Ward et al, 2018a).…”

“…They call for formal ontologies, advocate ontology-based SE (OBSE), and argue that the SE standards and SE body of knowledge will benefit from such cohesive SE ontology (Aslaksen et al, 2011;Engel et al, 2018;Ernadote, 2015;Giachetti, 2015;Givehchi et al, 2017;Hallberg et al, 2014;Martin et al, 2013;Mezhuyev, 2014).…”

Teknik, systemgräns och människa: Tekniklärares uppfattningar om vad tekniska system är<br/>Technology, system boundary, and human: Technology teachers' conceptions of what technological systems are

“…Detta får konsekvenser för lärare som vill hålla en tydlig och nyanserad undervisning om tekniska system med teknisk allmänbildning som mål. Studier inom andra tekniska ämnesfält har också visat att en tydlig konceptualisering av tekniska system underlättar kommunikationen mellan olika intressenter (Hallberg, Jungert, & Pilemalm, 2014).…”