Developing an ontology for standardizing space systems data exchange

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), in association with the Space Plug-and-play Architecture (SPA) program, has been developing the infrastructure to rapidly construct satellites using off-the-shelf avionics for space systems. One of the key enablers of rapid spacecraft assembly is the creation of a universal and standardized language for the exchange of data and commands between components, including hardware and software. This language has been formalized in an ontology, a complete set of definitions that describe a standard vocabulary of terms and their related meanings. By organizing the ontology into meaningful categories that subdivide the problem space into increasingly specialized classes, a hierarchical structure known as a taxonomy is generated. Multiple taxonomies have been developed to define the spacecraft bus resources in precise, logical names that uniquely identify each element and the associated attributes. This paper provides an overview of the spacecraft bus resource ontology structure in multiple taxonomies and includes examples of proposed standardized interfaces that have been developed using them.