An Ontology for Quality Management — Enabling Quality Problem Identification and Tracing

The TOVE Quality Ontology-VB is the formal representation (using First-order Logic) of terms, relationships, attributes, and axioms about quality which are generic beyond any specific quality domain. The assumption that quality is 'conformance to requirements' is used to decompose the quality domain into domains of measurement, identification, and traceability for further exploration; the TOVE Quality Ontology-VB is comprised of ontologies of these domains. An ontological engineering methodology comprised of motivating scenario, scope, and competency question statements, data model and axiom construction, and competency question/answer visualisation is demonstrated. The methodology is applied to develop the TOVE Traceability Ontology-VB. This ontology's representations are used to construct quality control applications enabling quality problem identification and tracing. They also enforce the properties of an entity that make it traceable — a novel and useful feature for quality control applications.