Large systems and systems of systems may confront analysts with hundreds or thousands of system requirements which may be distributed across multiple heterogeneous databases. This can make finding requirements relevant to a specific task a significant challenge. Individual systems are becoming more complex, and there is increasing focus on what are called “systems of systems.” System of systems are combinations or syntheses of multiple systems, each of which is capable of or designed for independent functioning. To further complicate things, many single systems are not built in anticipation of functioning within a system of systems.
Because requirements may be developed by separate contractors and distributed across multiple databases organized for different component systems, rather than the system of systems as a whole, it can be difficult to search or browse through numerous requirements in a coherent and unified manner. For example, different databases created by different entities for different purposes at different times may describe related requirements in different terminology and with a different organizational scheme. Further, systems engineers are often not granted “write” access to the systems with which they work, and thus they are not able to change and regularize data entries in order to unify unharmonious data.