Using Semantic Web Technologies to Support Information Processing and Coalition Decision-Making

This paper outlines three techniques and tools which have recently arisen from Semantic Web research in the International Technology Alliance. Each of these has been previously introduced in conference publications during 2008 but the purpose of this paper is to draw them together, explain their inter-relationships and to explain how they can be used collectively to support one of our fundamental research contexts: Coalition information processing and decision making. This paper provides the reader with a detailed overview of each along with a view of how they relate to one another and how each may better enable the usage of Semantic Web technologies to facilitate information integration and fusion in a distributed network context amongst disparate (coalition) communities with converged, but not necessarily aligned, goals. The first of these techniques is POAF (Portable Ontology Aligned Fragments) which addresses issues relating to the portability and usage of ontology alignments. POAF uses an ontology fragmentation strategy to achieve portability, and enables subsequent usage through a form of automated ontology modularization. The second technique, SWEDER (Sematic Wrapping of Existing Data sources with Embedded Rules), is grounded in the creation of lightweight ontologies to semantically wrap existing data sources, to facilitate rapid semantic integration through representational homogeneity and embedded rules. The third is NITELIGHT which is a tool that has been created to better support end users with respect to the creation and editing of semantic queries. NITELIGHT uses a visual query language which we have proposed, named vSPARQL and, as the name suggests, it is based on the W3C SPARQL query language specification. NITELIGHT supports end users by providing a set of graphical notations that represent semantic query language constructs enabling the user to combine ontology navigation capabilities with graphical query visualisation techniques.