Ontologies, Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Management

Abstract : This report describes: (1) the process of building, using and reusing the JFACC ontology for the domain of air campaign planning, and (2) an application called Strategy Development Assistant (SDA) that uses that ontology. The JFACC ontology served as a basis for knowledge sharing among several applications in the domain of air campaign planning. We describe how the ontology was built, how several applications made use of it as well as issues and lessons learned. The Strategy Development Assistant is a knowledge-based, mixed-initiative planning system to support air campaign planning. It supports military planners to decompose high-level objectives into move specific sub-objectives. The choice of decomposition is template driven based don a theory of air campaign planning provided by a domain expert. Since the SDA keeps the human in the loop", it can assist military planners while still giving them full control over each step in a very complex decision making process.