Ontology for Command and Control

KES IDT 2010, Baltimore, USA; 28 - 30 July 2010

A workshop on Ontology for Command and Control organized as part of the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligent Decision Technologies on the afternoon of Thursday, July 29.

Chair: Andreas Tolk; Co-Chairs: Barry Smith and Leslie Winters

For further details please go to the IDT website or contact Andreas Tolk.

Description

Information Systems are often applied to support command and control, not only in the military domain. Agile command and control requires agile information sharing with an increasingly wide variety of partners with very different world and business views. Current “net-centric” approaches improve information sharing on the technical level, but they fall short when it comes to the alignment of interpretation not just „interpretation; surely of data, processes, and constraints. They do not support information sharing across the larger command and control domain.

Intelligent Decision Technologies should bridge this gap. One of the most promising approaches to improve understanding and alignment as a presupposition of semantic interoperability between supporting systems is the use of ontologies. This invited session will present methods and applications of ontology-based methods, with a focus on Ontology for Intelligent Defence Decision Support. We will describe the underlying principles and provide success stories of such methods, and show how they can be used both within and without the defence domain.

Program

The session will include a tutorial by Barry Smith on How to Build an Ontology: The Command and Control Domain followed by a panel session led by Leslie Winters.

This tutorial will introduce the basic methods and tools of ontology, the successes and failures of ontology, the role of the Semantic Web and the OWL (Web Ontology Language), and the benefits which ontology can provide. It will explain the relations between ontologies, terminologies, and conceptual models. Finally, it will outline a general approach to ontology building and show how it can be applied in the Command and Control domain. The tutorial will be highly interactive. Further reading can be found at:

• http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA503107&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-555/paper5.pdf
• https://www.us.army.mil/suite/files/22057361

See also the general material on ontology at Barry Smith's webpage.

Details of the panel will follow shortly.