Ontology Development for Military Applications

In order for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become truly useful in high−level military applications it is necessary to identify, document, and integrate into automated systems the human knowledge that senior military professionals use to solve high−level problems. The skeletal structure for this work is provided through the development of an ontology. This paper presents brief overviews first on ontology development and then on the levels of war that senior military leaders deal with. This is followed by a description of the ontology development done for a course of action critiquing agent as part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) High Performance Knowledge Bases (HPKB) program. A military course of action is a preliminary candidate plan for how a military organization might attempt to accomplish an assigned mission. Course of action development is done at each level of war, strategic, operational and tactical, but this agent was developed to support the lowest, which is the tactical level. The paper next describes the expansion and extension of the course of action ontology required to represent the military concept of center of gravity used at the strategic level, which is the highest of the levels of war. This later work is a part of the DARPA Rapid Knowledge