ECSS Knowledge Library

The ECSS (European Cooperation for Space Standardization) was funded in 1996 an initiative established to develop a coherent, single set of user-friendly standards for use in all European space activities, thus providing the European space community with an integrated set of space-specific standards.

Among the wide variety of standards, the ones mapped in the ECSS Knowledge Library are the following:

• ECSS-S-ST-00-01C – Glossary of terms (1 October 2012)
• ECSS-E-ST-10-06C – Technical requirements specification (6 March 2009)
• ECSS-D-00-01C – Drafting rules and templates for ECSS Standards (20 May 2014; rev.1 1 July 2020)
• ECSS-D-00-02A – Drafting rules and templates for ECSS Handbooks (1 June 2012)

The content of the Knowledge Library is:

• Vocabulary/Dictionary/Glossary: as extracted from the ECSS-S-ST-00-01C – Glossary of terms
• Taxonomy of terms/Thesaurus: inferred from ECSS-S-ST-00-01C – Glossary of terms
• Taxonomy of types of requirements: the ones represented in ECSS-E-ST-10-06C – Technical requirements specification
• Requirements patterns: created using the examples that are given for each different type of requirement in ECSS-E-ST-10-06C – Technical requirements specification
• Requirements quality rules: following the recommendations in ECSS-E-ST-10-06C – Technical requirements specification
• Requirements quality rules: following the recommendations in ECSS-D-00-01C – Drafting rules and templates for ECSS Standards
• Requirements quality rules: following the recommendations in ECSS-D-00-02A – Drafting rules and templates for ECSS Handbooks

This content allows quality control teams to inspect requirements specifications following these rules (by using RQA – QUALITY Studio), and allows the authors of the requirements to have quality checking in real-time using the RAT – AUTHORING Tools plug-ins. Authors will also benefit from the implementation of requirements patterns, having the content of the patterns and the content of the glossary in front of them while writing the requirements.