Vendor-Interoperable Ontology Linking and Exploration Tool (VIOLET)

Digital engineering (DE) for complex systems is dependent on the expertise and collaboration of many stakeholders with varying domains and degrees of expertise. Over the course of a system's life cycle, stakeholders create, analyze, and maintain disparate models with increasing fidelity using tools and modeling paradigms that are specialized for each stage of the systemÆs life cycle. The models used often contain information that is duplicated or overlapping across two or more models, with no single model capturing the totality of information about the system. Without awareness and proper management of semantic relationships among data distributed across the entire collection of models, integration tools can introduce inconsistencies across tools and data sources leading to significant redesign, schedule slips, and cost increases. Vendor-Interoperable Ontology Linking and Exploration Tool (VIOLET) combines description logic reasoning, subgraph pattern matching, and distributed ontology technologies to infer general structural relationships across modeling paradigms and domain model vocabularies, providing stakeholders with a means to define and track individual relationships between entities in models from different data sources. VIOLET aggregates and analyzes these models, using the defined entity relationships to detect inconsistencies across model data as stakeholders update their models over the course of the systemÆs life cycle.