Formalisation and mapping of terminologies for Systems of Systems Engineering thesaurus

The emergence of Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) poses challenges to the consistent use of terminology within and/or across heterogeneous sectors such as transport, energy and defence. In preparation for Horizon 2020, an €80 billion financial instrument running from 2014 to 2020 to implement the Europe 2020 strategy, the European Commission funded T-AREA-SoS project to formulate a strategic research agenda for SoSE that spans US and Europe activities. As part of T-AREA-SoS, a thesaurus will be created to ensure that SoS concepts and terms are consistently interpreted, and to provide an artefact that will be of significant assistance to planners of future programmes in SoSE. This paper proposes an approach for the formalisation and mapping of terminologies for a SoSE thesaurus development. This paper also discusses the theoretical foundations and exemplars of this applied approach in addition to the user interface specification for a proposed web-based thesaurus development.