Developing the NASA Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge

Systems engineers across NASA needed a single place to go to find various assets to support them in their work, and to help ensure that their missions are successful. These assets ranged from templates and resources to various requirements and processes, as well as points of contact, etc. Hence, there was a need for a central NASA Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) to store and provide access to systems engineering resources of all types. The types of assets that are available in the NASA SEBoK fall into two broad categories, namely assets appropriate for a typical systems engineering body of knowledge (i.e., concepts, terms and activities that make up the SE professional domain), and assets for a typical Systems Engineering Asset Library (i.e., work aids, tools and methods to support system development). The recently developed NASA SEBoK has begun to capture the sum of knowledge within the profession of systems engineering at NASA. As an aid to the NASA SE Community, the NASA SEBoK has four ways to search for and view its assets, namely Type View (default), Life-Cycle View, Process View and Role View. This paper describes the approach to designing and developing the NASA SEBoK. It also summarizes the various types of assets and views, and discusses the processes for dispositioning assets, assigning metadata and populating the NASA SEBoK.