Ontologies and tools for analyzing and synthesizing LVC confederations

Establishing and maintaining interoperability among heterogeneous systems is a major challenge and expense for large business and military projects. Data interoperability and service-oriented architecture (SOA) approaches, while essential, do not provide a complete solution. We describe a complementary approach that uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to capture information about the roles and capabilities required to complete a task, and the attributes of candidate resources. Our toolset applies automated reasoning to determine whether each candidate resource has the requisite capabilities and is compatible with other resources. If there are multiple candidates for a role, the reasoner ranks the relative goodness of each with respect to constraints and metrics that are appropriate for the specific task needs of the exercise or deployment. We also describe a further application of the ontologies and toolset to assist in the creation of composable data exchange models.