Evaluation of Systems Engineering Ontologies: Experiences from Developing a Capability and Mission Ontology for Systems of Systems

This study is exploratory research aimed at evaluating a core ontology for missions and capabilities in systems of systems (SoS). The core ontology is an artifact that relates capabilities and missions into a holistic view of the SoS. This ontology is an effort towards improving the conceptual understanding of SoS, and how the desired outcome of the SoS is achieved through purposeful allocation of capabilities in mission contexts. The purpose of this evaluation study is to check the coherence of the core ontology artifact. Therefore, the study is designed to generate insight, understand the patterns of ideas and associations in the ontology artifact. It employs a survey research method and the use of questionnaire and interview tools for data collection. This study covers some aspects of the FOCA methodology for ontology evaluation. The FOCA methodology implements a goal-questionmetric process where the goals reflect the objective of knowledge representation, the questions justify the knowledge representation roles, and the metrics are the quality criteria of the respective goals. The paper also reflects on the experiences of ontology evaluation in general. The outcome of this study will provide a foundation for improvements and further research on ontologies and related artifacts that support the exploration of SoS.