It is important for system engineers to present the information on the systems that they are developing in a precise way so that the information can be understood by as many people as possible. The OMG Systems Modeling Language (SysML) (OMG 2008) was developed to meet that kind of needs of system engineers. It is a common practice to present descriptions of large systems using multiple views, each of which addresses one or more of the concerns of the system stakeholders. SysML has the concepts of view and viewpoint and it requires that a view conform to a viewpoint, which specifies conventions and rules for constructing and using the view, but it does not specify any method for specifying viewpoints. One of the examples of specifying viewpoints in a particular problem domain is an ISO/IEC standard called the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). This standard specifies five viewpoints to describe distributed processing systems, but it does not provide generic rules on how to construct viewpoints. This paper proposes a generic method for defining viewpoints in SysML by generalizing the concepts used in defining viewpoints in RM-ODP. By using this method, viewpoints to be used in different problem domains can be defined in a systematic way, and reuse and/or sharing of viewpoints across different problem domains can also be facilitated.
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