{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,5]],"date-time":"2025-12-05T12:04:38Z","timestamp":1764936278741,"version":"3.46.0"},"reference-count":51,"publisher":"Sociedade Brasileira de Computa\u00e7\u00e3o - SBC","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"Context: Diverse information needs to be traced and managed throughout the development lifecycle of safety-critical systems, such as requirements, design definitions, tests and code. A safety-critical system (SCS) undergoes certification procedures that require the presentation of arguments supporting the design and implementation decisions involved in the SCS construction. Nowadays, many regulations require elaborating assurance cases (ACs) to present such arguments. The integrated management of the diverse data required to produce the ACs can leverage the continuous traceability assessment and support the automated generation of ACs at any time in the SCS lifecycle. Objective: Ontologies can integrate metamodels to connect data from different domains. We designed and implemented a Safety Assurance Ontology (SAO) to integrate outputs of safety and software engineering activities. SAO encompasses an information model, rules and competency questions to support the work of software, safety and assurance engineers in the context of an SCS development that requires the production of ACs. Method: SAO was built based on knowledge extracted from safety datasets and argumentation patterns. This work presents the SAO\u2019s design, implementation, and evaluation through an illustrative scenario with public datasets and an expert survey with industrial practitioners and researchers. Results: SAO comprises concepts, relationships, and formation rules integrating safety assurance and software project information. We implemented the ontology information model and its formation rules using semantic web technologies. Conclusions: SAO can trace relevant project information, infer implicit information, and highlight traceability gaps in the public datasets evaluated. Practitioners find SAO\u2019s competency questions on traceability gaps useful in revealing direct and indirect relationships among project items. They also find that the basic competency questions facilitate the contextualisation of items traced in the project repositories. Also, they pointed out that adding specialisations for key concepts can enhance practitioners\u2019 grasp of the metamodel scope, thus promoting its applicability.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.5753\/sbqs.2025.14928","type":"proceedings-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,5]],"date-time":"2025-12-05T11:53:36Z","timestamp":1764935616000},"page":"204-214","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["An Ontology for Safety Assurance Information Management"],"prefix":"10.5753","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2375-3828","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Camilo","family":"Almendra","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0597-3851","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Carla","family":"Silva","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2181-7517","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"David","family":"Campelo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"3742","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ankit Agrawal, Seyedehzahra Khoshmanesh, Michael Vierhauser, Mona Rahimi, Jane Cleland-Huang, and Robyn Lutz. 2019. 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Discovering, Analyzing, and Managing Safety Stories in Agile Projects. IEEE 26th Intl. Requirements Engineering Conf. (2018), 262\u2013273.","DOI":"10.1109\/RE.2018.00034"},{"key":"13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Jane Cleland-Huang, Michael Vierhauser, and Sean Bayley. 2018. Dronology: An Incubator for Cyber-Physical Systems Research. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (Gothenburg, Sweden) (ICSE-NIER \u201918). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 109\u2013112. DOI: 10.1145\/3183399.3183408<\/a>","DOI":"10.1145\/3183399.3183408"},{"key":"14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"J.L. De La Vara, A. Ruiz, and H. Espinoza. 2018. Recent Advances towards the Industrial Application of Model-Driven Engineering for Assurance of Safety-Critical Systems. In Proc. of the 6th Intl. 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