CREATING AN ONTOLOGY FOR AIRCRAFT DESIGN An Experience Report About Development Process and the Resulting Ontology

Experts from various aircraft sub-domains have to collaborate in order to design an aircraft system. Each sub-domain thereby focuses on a particular aspect of the system and uses special software tools to model those aspects and run various calculations. As those models partially overlap, inconsistencies can occur that might lead to delays in the design process or malfunctions of the aircraft system. Hence, different models need to be checked for consistency. Furthermore, exchangeability of model data between tools enables the reuse information from an already existing model. To ensure that model data is compared and transformed appropriately to its meaning, a common, semantic representation of aircraft knowledge can be used to establish a reference. As ontologies are a formal, human and machine readable knowledge representation mechanism that explicitly captures semantics, they can serve as such a common semantic reference. In this paper we describe the development of the AIRCRAFT ontology following the NEON process model. In particular, we describe our experiences from applying the NEON methodology and the resulting AIRCRAFT ontology. The AIRCRAFT ontology is an OWL ontology that covers system decomposition and component parameters of a single aisle civil transport aircraft. It can be used as a common semantic reference during model comparison and transformation. Furthermore, the AIRCRAFT ontology can be extended using the NEON process model to serve other purposes that require a semantic representation of aircraft knowledge.