Abstract Every deployed DoD system undergoes certification (or qualification, for military) to assess the software system’s fitness for use. Certification requires that human subject matter expert look over evidence and evaluate its conformance to standards such as DO-178C or the Risk Management Framework (RMF). Current practices are not keeping pace with the ever-increasing size of software systems and the amount of evidence required for their certification. This problem is further exasperated when platforms are comprised of systems of systems developed by multiple suppliers, each providing data generated by different tools, in different formats, and captured with different granularity. We demonstrate the application of W3C Semantic web technologies to perform efficient evidence curation under a military research program. This tech stack offers the right solutions for integrating data from heterogeneous sources and for performing graph-traversal queries across data that changes at a regular frequency.

Writing requirements is no easy task. Common problems include ambiguity in statements, specifications at the wrong level of abstraction, statements with inconsistent references to types, conflicting requirements, and incomplete requirements. These pitfalls lead to errors being introduced early in the design process. The longer the gap between error introduction and error discovery, the higher the cost associated with the error. To address the growing cost of system development, we introduce a tool called ASSERT" (Analysis of Semantic Specifications and Efficient generation of Requirements-based Tests) for capturing requirements, backed by a formal requirements analysis engine. ASSERT" also automatically generates a complete set of requirements-based test cases. Capturing requirements in an unambiguous way and then formally analyzing them with an automated theorem prover eliminates errors as soon as requirements are written. It also addresses the historical problem that analysis engines are hard to use for someone without formal methods expertise and analysis results are often difficult for the end-user to understand and make actionable. ASSERT"'s major contribution is to bring powerful requirements capture and analysis capability to the domain of the end-user. We provide explainable and automated formal analysis, something we found important for a tool's adoptability in industry.