Ontology Based Information Exchange Management System Enabling Secure Coalition Interoperability

摘要

Military and humanitarian missions increasingly involve forces allied in a coalition. Real-time information exchange is indisputably a critical aspect required for the success of these missions. The rising challenge is the selection and control of the content shared with coalition partners. Which coalition partner needs to be included in operational information. How is it assured that in a changing situation all affected partners are alerted. Currently, this management of information exchange is accomplished by Information Management Officers (IMO), who manually sift through all incoming operational data. The information base, however, has increased over time to the point that the IMO is being overloaded. The Coalition Secure Management and Operations System (COSMOS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) was designed to help assist in the process of managing coalition information exchange and interoperability. Through the use of an ontology driven architecture, COSMOS is able to represent operational data with meaningful relationships and thus allows intelligent, autonomous software agents to reason about the needs of information exchange and assist the IMO in the decision making process. This information sharing is accomplished through the use of role-based Information Exchange Requirements (IER) which are individually assigned by the IMO and are specific to the roles played by each coalition member within the context of the overall mission. Agents, intelligent expert system software modules, are utilized to assist in the process of managing IER assignment and the assessment of information against the criteria which formalize the IER definition. It is through this process that information exchange is targeted to the coalition force components that have a specific requirement for information pertaining to their assigned roles.