Toward a verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A) ontology

Abstract

The Department of Defense (DoD) Modeling and Simulation Steering Committee (M&S SC) is sponsoring several Acquisition Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Projects. One of those projects is titled, Standardized Documentation for Verification, Validation, and Accreditation (VV&A). Previous efforts defined standardized content and format requirements (i.e., templates) for four core VV&A documents, now codified in a new Military Standard (MIL-STD-3022) and associated Data Item Descriptions. A tool is under development to automate those templates to assist developers in creating standardized VV&A information across the DoD and Military Departments. In support of this effort, the Naval Postgraduate School was tasked to specify data structures and content using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for metadata and content of VV&A documentation. Based on the initial work, NPS was further tasked to design and develop an ontological foundation for formal description of VV&A information. This document describes preliminary work toward development of an ontology for VV&A that will facilitate future search, discovery, and processing of VV&A information to better meet user needs.