A Tool for Building Semantically Interoperable Specification and Standards

Standards and specifications are widely used in government and industry to define requirements for products and processes and insure interoperability, safety, and quality of industrial and domestic products. Specifications and standards documents almost always cross-reference other standards and specification. Taken together, the web of interdependent standards forms an immensely important knowledge base. However, this knowledge is not structured in a way the enables potential enhancements. In order to develop a structured, model-based view of the web of standards, XSB will extend the NIST Ontological Visualization Interface for Standards (NOVIS) system to work with an existing knowledge base and existing test extraction and classification technology, and with existing requirements management tools. XSB will investigate the feasibility of combining these into an application that helps users create structured models for new and existing specifications that use a consistent ontology.