Opportunities for Next Generation BML: Semantic C-BML

Abstract : Battle Management Language is an unambiguous language to facilitate the command and control of forces and equipment in a military environment and to provide information for situational awareness. Coalition Battle Management language (C-BML) is a standardization effort to define BML in a Coalition environment to support information exchange among a range of simulation systems and command and control (c2) Systems. A SISO Product Development Group (PDG) was formed in the spring of 2006 to implement the standardization process. The group has concluded the first phase of development; that phase is focused on the formalization of syntax. Recent coalition experiments have shown that complex XML schemas can impede development and testing speed . This paper demonstrates that an ontology-based model can provide better readability and allow users to generate necessary XML components. A semantically enriched C-BML can support processing C-BML expressions based on semantic constraints. This paper presents an analysis of the applicability of the current standards of semantic representation languages including Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) to a C-BML Ontology. We explore ontological alignment of C-BML Ontology with upper level ontologies for time. Based on recent experiments of the NATO Modeling and Simulation Group technical activity 085, we present use-cases and benefits of having ontological reasoning as a means of processing C-BML documents.