Systems Engineering Education at ISR and Ontology-Enabled Traceability Mechanisms

Mark Austin
Associate Professor
Institute for Systems Research and Civil and Environmental Engineering Department

The University of Maryland has now had a Master of Science in Systems (MSSE) Program for a little over 20 years. This talk will begin with a quick review of where this program has come from, what we have done in the past decade, where we are today, and what we hope to accomplish in the next five years.

The talk will then switch modes and focus on research and development for ontology-enabled traceability mechanisms. This work is an attempt to leverage Semantic Web Technologies for Requirements Engineering, and to create new modeling abstractions where support for design rule checking is embedded in traceability relationships. We will describe a prototype implementation: ontology-enabled traceability mechanisms for design and operation of the Washington DC Metro System. The talk will conclude with a brief description of future work and expected benefits.