Basic Concepts and Distinctions for an Aerospace Ontology of Functions, Entities and Problems

Aerospace problems and corrective actions involve hardware, software, processes, operations, humans and organizations. This paper describes a set of taxonomies for interpreting descriptions of aerospace entities, functions, properties and problems. Each category expresses a class concept. Categories have associated 'mapping' words and phrases (synonyms or names) that express these concepts. The taxonomies and mapping words are designed to support ontology development and aid text analysis. The text analysis has been used to semi-automatically generate system functional models from requirements. Text analysis can also be used to find trends and recurrences in problem reports and change requests. The paper describes an upper ontology that provides top-level distinctions for classifying objects, occurrences, properties and mathematical abstractions. Additional taxonomies partition descriptions, concepts, entities, functions/actions, problems, and refining properties. The paper describes a use case, semantic extraction and classification of key concepts in free text in the space shuttle problem reporting database.