Application of OWL 1.1 to Systems Engineering

Current systems engineering languages, standards, and tools are restricted in certain aspects of their expressiveness and do not pro- vide formal semantics. While there is a long history of attempts to use formal methods for engineering, up to now the formalisms have generally proved too hard to use, and the tools do not scale for large complex sys- tem development. A semantic integration framework that can integrate representations from multiple system engineering languages and tools could, however, have a significant impact on cost, schedule, and product integrity. We are exploring the potential for OWL 1.1 to provide such a semantic integration for the air system engineering domain. To deter- mine the potential to use OWL 1.1 in this setting we are developing a prototypical air system ontology in OWL 1.1 and evaluating the use of the language for developing and reasoning about systems engineering concepts such as requirements and product structure.