Ontology of Military Planning and Operations Assessment

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?

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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

Why the CALL Thesaurus will not work

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

Information elements

Mental elements

Action-related elements

What is the living plan?

Appendix: Draft Plan Ontology

See current version of the ontology here

See additional slides on the ontology of deontic elements and on collaborative plan execution [http://ncor.buffalo.edu/plan-ontology/STIDS-Tutorial-2014/1-Smith-2.pptx

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

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

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
• Planning Ontology Draft (.xlsx)
• 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).