The space industry and space agencies have been aware for quite some time of the interest and added value of model-based system engineering (MBSE) in streamlining the design, development, deployment and verification of space systems. There have been many initiatives during the past decades aiming at defining models and tools able to support the various needs of the system engineering process. MBSE is increasingly being used in operational projects and the next step is to use MBSE extensively throughout the system life cycle, across disciplines and throughout the supply chain.

OSMoSE (Overall Semantic Modelling for System Engineering) arises from the need to enable interoperability among model-based infrastructures to allow the exchange of information among different stakeholders. Namely, the solution to address interoperability at semantic level is to do information modelling at system specification level (i.e. the 'what'), building a global conceptual data model for the Space System – the Space System Ontology.