Ontologies for Rapid Integration of Heterogeneous Data for Command, Control, & Intelligence

Ontologies enable explicit expression of collective concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and exposed on a network offer the potential for unprecedented interoperability solutions since they are semantically rich, computer interpretable and inherently extensible. In this chapter, we describe how we applied ontologies in OWL for rapid enterprise integration of heterogeneous data sources to track objects in a battlespace. We found that once a robust foundational domain ontology is established, it is easy and quick to integrate new data sources and therefore rapidly provide new system capabilities. In particular, we demonstrate how moving tracks can be quickly integrated with intelligence and space events to provide enhanced situational awareness using ontologies. This chapter also describes the overall SEER and SWORIER systems we developed, the latter of which translated OWL ontologies (and RDF instances) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules into Prolog, applied knowledge compilation techniques, and then at runtime, utilized a combined OWL/logic programming reasoned for efficient automated reasoning. We also briefly describe a more recent extension to the prototype and to the ontologies that we made to address more rigorous geospatial rules for unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) avoidance. Finally, we consider some issues raised by our work and future lines of research to address these.