Ontology Configuration Management for Knowledge-Centric Systems Engineering in Industry

The engineering of safety-critical systems is a complex process whose cost-effectiveness is very important. Reuse of system artefacts is an activity that can contribute to improving quality and to saving costs during the process. Reuse must pay attention to artefact configuration management, as an artefact evolves through different versions and such an evolution must be properly managed. An artefact type that is used nowadays in industry for the engineering of safety-critical systems and can be reused is ontologies, which represent system domain information via knowledge representations. However, academic approaches for ontology reuse do not meet industrial needs for their application for systems engineering. As a solution, this paper presents an industrial approach to define and operate ontologies as libraries of knowledge to enable ontology configuration management. The approach supports the reuse and exploitation of domain knowledge through operations for mapping, alignment, and merge of ontology elements. The proposed approach, the current implementation, and validation activities are presented on top of the Knowledge Manager tool.