Probabilistic ontology for net-centric fusion

In a net-centric world, systems will be required to fuse data from geographically dispersed, heterogeneous information sources operating asynchronously, to produce up-to-date, mission-relevant knowledge to inform commanders. Realizing this vision requires overcoming a number of technical challenges. Among these is the need for semantic interoperability among systems with different internal data models and vocabularies. Ontologies are seen as a key enabling technology for semantic interoperability. Although information fusion by nature involves reasoning under uncertainty, traditional ontology formalisms provide no principled means of reasoning under uncertainty. This paper proposes the use of probabilistic ontologies within a service-oriented architecture as a means to enable semantic interoperability in net-centric fusion systems.