OWL-based ontology construction method for battlefield information service

With the constant development of IT, on-demand battlefield information sharing becomes the urgent need for military to achieve information superiority and win network centric warfare. In this paper, a method is proposed for building ontology which can support Battlefield Information Service (BIS). Based on the requirement analysis of BIS, Battlefield Information Ontology (BIO) is constructed in OWL, including Top-Frame Ontology (TFO) and Domain-Branch Ontology (DBO). The value assignment properties are added to solve the assignment problem of concepts with different data types. And a new problem, the integrated reasoning of preconditions and outputs, is raised in this paper. A concept may be equal to another one under some precondition, which cannot be discovered in classical way of matching preconditions and the outputs separately. To express the above equivalent relation in ontology, a transformation model is proposed to make OWL have the ability to describe high-order relations, which only allows first-order relations formerly. An application example is given to show how the ontology supports semantic-based BIS publishing, query and match.