ASoTs, Digital Threads, and Views - Oh My!

Ask a dozen engineers to define Digital Thread and you will get a baker's dozen definitions (if not more). This is true of many other Digital Engineering terms, including Authoritative Source of Truth (ASoT), View, what constitutes the "content" of an ASoT (in other words, the Truth in Authoritative Source of Truth), and whatever it is that can consult an ASoT and give us back a View. Even the more technical terms above have taken on buzzword status within Digital Engineering, making them difficult, if not impossible, to use in formal discussions about Digital Engineering. We, as engineers, need to reclaim these terms if we are to leverage them to make meaningful progress in the execution of Digital Engineering. We need to establish clear definitions that convey the role these terms play within programs and enterprises. We need to ensure these definitions are concise, supporting a wide range of stakeholders to establish a shared understanding of the terms. And we need to craft these terms with measurable definitions that create a foundation for establishing requirements that these terms must satisfy. What we need is to model definitions and architecture for these key terms of Digital Engineering that we can all share and build upon.

What you will learn:

• An approach for modeling definitions that can be used as the foundation for developing architecture to realize those definitions
• A proposed set of formal definitions for these key terms of Digital Engineering modeled according to the presented approach
• How the definitions are being transformed into an architecture of Digital Engineering