Creating a Space System Ontology Using “Fact Based Modeling” and “Model Driven Development” Principles

In this practical paper we describe our ongoing project of building a candidate skeleton for the new Space System Ontology that is to be used by the space system community; starting from the vision: being able to achieve semantic interoperability instead of focusing on technical interoperability), through our approach: Fact Based Modeling (FBM) and Model Driven Development (MDD) and finally ending with the results: an Object Role Model containing the semantic model of the Space System Ontology. This project is based on the already existing meta-model of Arcadia, a field proven method for model based system engineering. By reverse engineering the UML-based meta-model of a tool supporting the method, we were able to remove the technical HOW’s and restore the true conceptual meaning of the meta-model. We will describe the algorithms we used for automatically reverse engineering UML-based meta-models to ORM-models, we will talk about the value of connecting the conceptual model to real-life examples by visualizing, and introduce the process of automatically generating editors in order to verify completeness and correctness by populating the model. We will conclude with general findings while reverse engineering UML-based models and some tips on how to solve typical modeling problems that arises when transforming object oriented artifacts to their semantic equivalents.