Engineered solutions are becoming more complex and multi‐disciplinary in nature. This evolution requires new techniques to enhance design and analysis tasks that incorporate data integration and interoperability across various engineering tool suites spanning multiple domains at different abstraction levels. Semantic web technologies (SWT) offer data integration and interoperability benefits as well as other opportunities to enhance reasoning across knowledge represented in multiple disparate models. This paper introduces the digital engineering framework for integration and interoperability (DEFII) for incorporating SWT into engineering design and analysis tasks. The framework includes three notional interfaces for interacting with ontology‐aligned data. It also introduces a novel model interface specification diagram (MISD) that provides a tool‐agnostic model representation enabled by SWT that exposes data stored for use by external users through standards‐based interfaces. Use of the framework results in a tool‐agnostic authoritative source of truth spanning the entire project, system, or mission.

Individual model verification is a common practice that increases the quality of design on the left side of the Vee model, often before costly builds and prototypes are implemented. However, verification that spans multiple models at higher levels of abstraction (e.g., subsystem, system, mission) is a complicated endeavor due to the federated nature of the data. This paper presents a tool-agnostic approach to higher-level verification tasks that incorporates tools from Semantic Web Technologies (SWTs) and graph theory more generally to enable a three-pronged verification approach to connected data. The methods presented herein use existing SWTs to characterize a verification approach using ontology-aligned data from both an open-world and closed-world perspective. General graph-based algorithms are then introduced to further explore structural aspects of portions of the graph. This verification approach enables a robust model-based verification on the left side of the Vee model to reduce risk and increase the visibility of the design and analysis work being performed by multidisciplinary teams.