Abstract
Recently, the increased complexity of systems has made systems engineering necessary. It is very useful for system designers to understand the whole context of the concerned system based on systems engineering. A system model can be used to describe the outcome of a system design. A system model describes the system from the viewpoint of the stakeholder's needs using the mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive principle. A system model can be used to smoothly design a large and complicated system based on the systems engineering development process. Many companies and countries are attempting to apply model-based systems engineering, and the significance of the system model quality is increasing as system models are referenced during system development. In this paper, we propose a quality assessment method for ontology which is one of system models by focusing on the system development process. First, in this process, a system developer should explicitly show the relationship between viewpoints. Then, the system developer should select dependent rather than independent viewpoints. With dependent viewpoints, each viewpoint used to describe the system has some logical relationship. The set of viewpoints makes it possible to show, not only tangible and physical system parts, but also conceptual system parts. In this paper, we develop an ontological system model of a Japanese weather observation system. By comparing some ontological system models, we verify the effectiveness of explicitly describing the relationships between viewpoints and select dependent viewpoints.