A JC3IEDM OWL-DL Ontology

Steven Wartik Institute for Defense Analyses Alexandria, VA [email protected] One of the major unanswered questions about the semantic web is the degree to which real-world business rules can be expressed in OWL-DL. Ontologies that only contain class hierarchies are useful searching aides, but are unlikely to promote automated reasoning and classification. Only ontologies augmented with more complex concepts can effectively identify inconsistencies and classify individuals. However, OWL-DL is by design restrictive in what concepts it can represent. It will only prove truly useful if its restrictions mainly apply to uncommon situations. In this paper we discuss using OWL to express business rules from the domain of Consultation, Command and Control (C3). We have created an OWL-DL representation of the Joint C3 Information Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM). The JC3IEDM is a NATO standard agreement (STANAG 5525) for information exchange among NATO members in C3. The JC3IEDM has been under development for 11 years, and its antecedents date back to the 1980s. It contains over 4,500 business rules that govern valid relationships among its data elements. It can fairly be said to represent a nontrivial domain-specific body of knowledge derived from experience and real-world concerns. Historically, the JC3IEDM has been used to achieve common understanding and a shared operational picture through information exchange via database messaging and replication, but in the past few years its governing body has considered how it can be used in a netcentric environment. It is our belief that the JC3IEDM is well suited to use in net-centric operations. It comprises many commonly used concepts (Figure 1) and draws on authoritative sources to define them. It can provide a rich foundational ontology for elements of C3 (and C2).