Ontological Definition of Seamless Digital Engineering Based on ISO/IEC 25000-Series SQuaRE Product Quality Model

Abstract

Since the introduction of Digital Engineering (DE) as a well-defined concept in 2018, organizations and industry groups have been working to interpret the DE concepts to establish consistent meta-models of those interrelated concepts for integration into their DE processes and tools. To reach the breadth and depth of DE concept definitions, the interpretation of international standard sources is necessary, including ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, 24765, 42000-series, 15408, 15206, 27000-series, and 25000-series, to effectively model the knowledge domain where digital engineering applies. The harmonization of the concepts used in these international standards continues to improve with each revision, but it may be more effectively accomplished by relying on the descriptive logic formalized in the Web Ontology Language (OWL 2 DL). This paper presents a verified and consistent ontology based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Common Core Ontologies (CCO) that defines Seamless Digital Engineering as a digital tooling paradigm that relies on formal verification of digital interfaces to provide a system-level qualification of the assured integrity of a Digital Engineering Environment. The present work defines classes and equivalence axioms, while using only the BFO- and CCO-defined object properties that relate them, to provide a baseline analysis that may inform future DE-related ontology development, using a case study to formally define the ‘seamless’ quality in relation to the updated ISO 25010 SQuaRE product quality model. We identified ISO meta-model inconsistencies that are resolvable using the BFO/CCO ontological framework, and define ‘seamless’ as both a system integration quality and a Human-Computer Interface quality-in-use, working to disambiguate this concept in the context of DE.