Ontological engineering for threat evaluation and weapon assignment: a goal-driven approach

Providing commanders with advanced decision aids requires a good understanding of the processes involved, their information requirements, and the development of formal domain models upon which reasoning processes can be based. Ontologies, as formal domain models, constitute a key component to provide a shared understanding of a domain, and have received increasing interest for the building of advanced information systems and to facilitate knowledge level interoperability among heterogeneous information sources. Our objective is to contribute to the building of ontological models in support of information fusion and to exploit these models to provide enhanced knowledge management assistance to military commanders. In this paper, we describe the goal-driven ontological analysis carried out in support of decision aids for above water warfare threat evaluation and weapon assignment.