Semantics-Driven Systems Engineering: Requirements and Prerequisites for a New Flavor of Model-Driven Engineering

Model-driven engineering (MDE) traditionally relied on a generic notion of “model transformation” to bridge design with software implementation, or the so-called “design-time” and “run-time” phases of systems engineering. Frameworks to support this have been standardized, leading to formal specifications such as MOF or XMI. The field is dominated by XML serializations for perhaps historical reasons, at a time when XML seemed to be an interoperability paradigm more than a (meta)language and was holistically adopted for all model interchange and bridging concerns in MDE. This chapter discusses an emergent notion of “Semantics-driven systems engineering” (SDSE) as a specific flavor of MDE and argues that knowledge representation must take over the role traditionally allocated to XML, as custom semantics must be made available to engineering processes and digital artifacts by means of knowledge capture tools. SDSE may be superseded by the generic MDE notions if we abstract away its pragmatic characteristics; however, this chapter advocates that it is worth examining its specialized characteristics having both methodological and technological specificity. They can inform research and practice on requirements and pre-requisites to potentially streamline SDSE as a repeatable process and as a practice expanding the value proposition of domain-specific conceptual modeling, to be highlighted here through examples derived from OMiLAB educational or research projects.