Ontology of Military Planning and Operations Assessment
The Living Plan
- Erik Thomsen, Fred Read, William Duncan, Tatanya Malyuta and Barry Smith, “Ontological Support for Living Plan Specification, Execution and Evaluation”, Proceedings of the Conference on Semantic Technology in Intelligence, Defense and Security, Fairfax, VA, (STIDS 2014), CEUR, vol. 1304, 10-17.
Tutorial organized as part of the 2014 Semantic Technologies for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS) Conference
- Date: November 18, 2014
- Time: 13:00 - 18:00
- Venue: Dewberry Hall, Johnson Center, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030
The background of this tutorial is a US Air Force Research Laboratory initiative to transform Air Force planning and operations assessment from a disjointed static approach based on paper documents into a unified dynamic approach based on a computational 'living plan'. Part of this initiative will rest on the development of an ontology of plans and of military operations, viewing the latter as forming a three-stage cycle of plan specification, plan execution, and post-execution review. This cycle is seen as continuously unfolding on the strategic, operational and tactical levels – hence 'living plan'. A special role is played by the issue of devising a framework for the coordination of collaborative agency across large organizations. How can we build feedback mechanisms into the planning and outcomes assessment process in such a way as to enable evolutionary improvement in the framework over time?
Schedule
13:00 Barry Smith (NCOR) Slides
- The role of doctrine in the planning process
- Why planning needs a controlled vocabulary
- An Example: The CALL (Center for Army Lessons Learned) Thesaurus
- Need for a plan ontology as part of a suite of interoperable military ontology modules
- Basic Formal Ontology as upper level architecture
- Populating ontology modules through iterative extension
- Plans vs plan specifications
- The Information Artifact Ontology
- Anatomy of a plan specification
- Elements of the planning process: Informational, Mental, Action-related
- What is the living plan?
- Appendix: Draft Plan Ontology based on military doctrine
13:50 Frederick Reed (Charles River Analytics) Slides
- The current state of planning
- Strategic level
- Operations level
- Ops assessment
- Re-tasking
- What works; what doesn’t
- What’s needed
14:40 Break
15:00 Erik Thomsen (Charles River Analytics) Slides
- Motivations and approach
- Types
- Typed ontologies
- Typed Ontology-driven planning systems
- Conclusions
16:30 BS, FR, ET and tutorial participants
- Exploratory session to allow critical review, presentation of alternative approaches, identification of potential secondary uses
Background
- Document Acts
- Papers on Military Ontology
- Planning Ontology Draft (.owl)
- Military Ontologies
- Information Artifact Ontology
- Information Ontologies for the Intelligence Community
- Joint Operation Planning
- Command and Control of Joint Air Operations (JP 3.30)
- Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare (JP 3.13.1)
Faculty
Frederick Reed, scientist at Charles River Analytics working in areas such as man-machine systems analysis, human factors, organizational learning and development, knowledge management, and applied philosophy (particularly Pragmatism of C.S. Peirce).
Barry Smith, founder of the Ontology for the Intelligence Community (now STIDS) conference series, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of ontology and semantic technology. He is Professor of Philosophy, Biomedical Informatics, Neurology, and Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Director of the National Center for Ontological Research.
Erik Thomsen is Senior Scientist - Cognitive Systems at Charles River Analytics in Boston, MA. He has over 20 years experience creating analytical software and business applications with an emphasis on intelligent systems and socio-economic and environmental models. He is also the author of multiple publications on data integration and fusion, semantic technologies, visualization, pattern recognition, foundations of logic, language and mathematics, and of the influential textbook OLAP: Building Multidimensional Information Systems (Wiley, 2nd edition).
