Ontology of Military Planning and Operations Assessment

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Tutorial organized as part of the 2014 Semantic Technologies for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS) Conference

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) [1]

Role of doctrine (C2W, Joint Planning)
Role of speech act theory and document act theory
Document Control Ontology
How actions control documents
How documents control documents
How documents control actions
The orchestral score and its subscores
Plans vs Plan specifications
Anatomy of a plan specification

13:50 Frederick Reed (Charles River Analytics)

Review of existing military planning and operations assessment regimes
APEX
Identification of resulting problems
Gap assessment
Need: Ontology for Smart Information Grids for multi-level planning agencies

14:40 Break

15:00 Erik Thomsen

Realizing a computational framework for the living plan
Modules (phases in the cycle):
Situational Awareness
Plan Development
Plan Review and Selection
Plan Commitment (transforming selected plan specification into plan)
Plan Absorption
Plan Communication (plans and subplans to be executed by corresponding sub-units)
Plan Execution
Plan Evaluation and Operations / Outcomes Assessment (actual vs. predicted outcomes)
The underlying multidimensional information system
Data ingestion of multi-channel information
Kinetic sensors
video
HUMINT

15.50 Barry Smith

The ontology of shared agency across large organizations
From tactical to strategic: how can we create computational environments that will take account of single- and multi-level collaborative agency?
Review of the history of approaches to military planning and operations assessment

16:40 Break

17:00 ET, BS and tutorial participants

Exploratory session to allow critical review, presentation of alternative approaches, identification of potential secondary uses

Background


Faculty

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).

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.