Vendor-Interoperable Ontology Linking and Exploration Tool (VIOLET)

The Vendor-Interoperable Ontology Linking and Exploration Tool (VIOLET) project will develop a tool that will allow multiple stakeholders across roles and engineering disciplines to easily traverse, understand, associate, and synchronize information distributed across multiple organizations, stored in multiple repositories, represented in different modeling languages and formats, and manipulated with different tools and environments. Digital Engineering (DE) for complex systems is dependent on the expertise and collaboration of many stakeholders with varying domains and degrees of expertise. Stakeholders collaborate during the design, implementation, testing, deployment, and other phases of a system's lifecycle using a diverse collection of tools, policies, procedures, and practices. This presents four key challenges:  Tool Interoperability: Addressing the semantic gap that exists between modeling languages and data formats managed by different tools and vendors.  Data Aggregation: Retrieving and integrating information distributed across multiple tools, vendors, repositories, and legacy development infrastructures and accessed through different protocols and interfaces.  Data Source Synchronization: Inferring when duplicate information is represented in multiple data sources and propagating changes to maintain consistency across data sources based on synchronization triggers. Data Traversal: Providing users with a way to explore and visualize authoritative source of truth (ASOT) information as a whole, subject to access restrictions, to better understand and analyze the entire dataset. By combining description logic reasoning, subgraph pattern matching, and distributed ontology technologies, VIOLET will pull information from disparate sources and present it to stakeholders using terminology familiar to them in a way that supports their specific tasks while keeping the information semantically-consistent across tools and data sources. VIOLET will provide transformative new capabilities to support multi-disciplinary collaboration and multi-model visualization. The Phase I project will establish the feasibility of VIOLET to meet the digital engineering needs of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs (SSP).