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

Increasingly Command and Control (C2) systems require the ability to respond to rapidly changing environments and intelligence. C2 systems must be agile, able to integrate new sources of information rapidly for enhanced situational awareness and response to real-time events. Data from varied sources across the world must be integrated and transformed into knowledge that can be leveraged. Machine-to-machine capabilities are also increasingly necessary to accomplish mission goals. To this end, we developed ontologies and rules to address emerging mission needs. We have found that ontologies and rules offer a powerful tool for rapid enterprise integration. With these, we were able to integrate new sources of data within hours, instead of weeks or months as with traditional software development methods. Our work is being showcased at the Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX) 2008 for its quick integration of data into usable intelligence-fed C2. This paper describes the use case, the ontologies used to model the use case, and how they support rapid, enterprise integration of C2 and intelligence information, and our prototype Semantic Environment for Enterprise Reasoning (SEER).