An Ontology for Multi-Level Data Fusion

This paper defines a working ontology to represent entities across all fusion levels, as well as for corresponding entity states and state estimates at all fusion levels. The proposed ontology involves a common representational scheme for simple and complex structures at all fusion levels, thereby facilitating inference within and among levels. Formalisms are defined for consistent representation of simple and complex entities, entity states, and state estimates at all fusion levels. By reifying relations and relationships, and treating attributes as 1-dimensional versions of these, we can apply the whole battery of level 1 fusion machinery to level 2 and 3 problems. This has advantages of design reuse and synergy across the levels. We illustrate such belief propagation in a simple Electronic Combat used case.