4. What is the language used by systems architects and engineers?

Modeling processes, activities and techniques use the generic terms of a technical vocabulary to define the engineering data or entities of a given system. These entities are linked together by relationships that reflect the links between activities or processes; the set of entities and their relationships is called an "ontology" or metadata model or "meta-model", or "semantic model".

Using this ontology will enable you to ensure the consistency and completeness of the engineering data describing your system, to establish the traceability of requirements, and to carry out impact studies in the event of changes. Tools equipped with databases are extremely useful for this purpose. The figure below shows the main entities and relationships for implementing engineering processes and certain modeling techniques. Additional information is given in the attributes of each...