Experiences in Developing An Intelligent Ground Vehicle (IGV) Ontology In Protégé

The level of automation in ground combat vehicles being developed for the Army's objective force is greatly increased over the Army's legacy force. This automation is taking many forms in emerging ground vehicles; varying from operator decision aides to fully autonomous unmanned systems. The development of these intelligent ground vehicles requires a thorough understanding of all of the intelligent behavior that needs to be exhibited by the system so that designers can allocate functionality to humans and or machines. Tradition system specification techniques focused heavily on the functional description of the major systems of a vehicle and implicitly assumed that a well-trained crew would operate these systems in a manner to accomplish the tactical mission assigned to the vehicle. In order to allocate some or all of these intelligent behaviors to machines in future ground vehicles it is necessary to be able to identify and describe these intelligent behaviors in detail. For several years, DCS Corporation has been supporting the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) in the exploration of approaches to model the ground vehicle domain with explicit representation of intelligent behavior. This exploration included the analysis of modeling languages (i.e., UML, DAML, OWL) as well as reference architectures. During this same period the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been applying its Real-time Control System (RCS) reference architecture to unmanned vehicle systems and has also been investigating various modeling techniques to describe RCS designs. Recognizing the utility of RCS methodology for identifying and describing intelligent behavior and a common interest in evaluating ontologies as an approach to modeling systems in this domain, TARDEC initiated a joint effort with DCS and NIST to prototype an ontology for the intelligent ground vehicle domain. In this paper, we describe the joint effort currently being performed by DCS Corporation and NIST to develop an intelligent ground vehicle (IGV) ontology using Protégé. The goal of this effort is to develop a common, implementation-independent, extendable knowledge source for researchers and developers in the intelligent vehicle community that will: • Provide a standard set of domain concepts along with their attributes and interrelations • Allow for knowledge capture and reuse • Facilitate systems specification, design, and integration , and • Accelerate research in the field. This paper describes the methodology we have used to capture knowledge in this domain and approaches we have tried to store and visualize that …