IAO-Intel An Ontology of Information Artifacts in the Intelligence Domain

1. IAO-IntelAn Ontology of Information Artifacts in the Intelligence Domain

2. Military Doctrine and Standardization of Terminology 3rd Century BC Standardized beacon signals used by Chinese military along Great Wall 1792 Drill manual for the units of the Continental Army to respond uniformly to commands during the Revolutionary War 1943 General James Gavin’s Training Memorandum on the Employment of Airborne Forces

3. General James Gavin, On to Berlin: Battles of an Airborne Commander 1943-1946 for success of the D-Day invasion ‘one of our most critical needs was to standardize the operating practices of our forces. … even simple terminology had to be agreed upon. … British flew in what they called “bomber stream” formations, We preferred troop-carrier group formations of 36 planes that flew in a V ... We referred to landing area as the “jump area,” the British called it “drop zone,” …’

6. Current state • DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Joint Publication 1-02) • New military dictionaries and terminology artifacts continue to be developed • Dominant ethos: Library Science (all terminologies are equal), Lexicography (logical consistency of definitions is not important)

7. Goals of Doctrinal Documents • Advance consistency in communications • Facilitate consistent interpretation of commands • Compile lessons learned (outcomes assess­ment) • Provide controlled vocabularies for official reporting Nowadays • Enhance discoverability and analysis of data

8. Problems of Doctrinal Documents • Little aid to computation • Developed independently in divergent and non-principled ways • Low possibility of aggregation causing failures of data integration initiatives • New approaches needed that can enable computational discovery, retrieval, integration and processing of data

9. Two kinds of data • Data about entities in the world (topics, subject-matters) standard ontologies 2. Data about the information artifacts in which these entities are represented (= metadata) Information Artifact Ontology and extensions, including IAO-Intel

10. Information artifact • (roughly) an entity created through some deliberate act or acts by one or more human beings, and which endures through time, potentially in multiple (for example digital or printed) copies Examples: a diagram on a sheet of paper, a video file, a map on a computer monitor, an article in a newspaper, a message on a network, the output of some querying process in a computer memory

11. IAO • IAO-Intel – to provide common resources for the consistent description of information artifacts of relevance to the intelligence community in a way that will allow discovery, integration and analysis • compare Dublin Core (brought to you by Library Science) http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu/presentations/tutorial2013.php

12. What IAO is for • IAO is not designed to replace existing doctrinal or other standards • lots of documents exist conforming to lots of different standards • purpose of IAO is to allow generation of the needed metadata in a uniform, non-redundant and algorithmically processablefashion

13. Sample terms in IAO

14. Strategy of Building IAO-Intel

15. IAO-Intel The IAO-Intel terms on the top are defined by using terms from the ontologies on the bottom with the help of relations such as is-about, created-by, derives-from and so forth

16. Attributes of Information Artifacts • Examples • Purpose • Life­cycle Stage (draft, finished version, revision) • Language, • Format • Provenance • Source (person, organization) • These are generic attributes, common to all areas • IAO will contain a Low-Level Ontology module for each dimension

17. Generic Purpose Attributes • Descriptivepurpose: scientific paper, newspaper article, after-action report • Prescriptive purpose: legal code, license, statement of rules of engagement • Directive purpose (of specifying a plan or method for achieving something): instruction, manual, protocol • Designative purpose: a registry of members of an organization, a phone book, a database linking proper names of persons with their social security numbers

18. Attributes Specific to Intelligence IAs

19. Use of IAO-Intel – Example:Digitalizing an MCOO • IA #1 - Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) - a joint intelligence preparation of the operational environment product used to portray the militarily significant aspects of the operational environment, such as obstacles restricting military movement, key geography, and military objectives.

20. Digitalizing an MCOO • Annotations to the attributes of IA#1 • ICE: MCOO • IBE: Acetate Sheet • uses-symbology MIL-STD-2525C • authored-by person #4644 • Annotations relating to the aboutness of IA#1 • Avenue of Approach • Strategic Defense Belt • Amphibious Operations • Objective

21. Computational Support for Process Planning

23. Use of IAO-Intel – Example 2Digitalizing U.S. Army Report and Message Formats (FM 6-99.2) Standard templates for • Intelligence Report [INTREP] • Intelligence Summary [INTSUM] • Logistics Situation Report [LOGSITREP] • Operations Summary [OPSUM] • Patrol Report [PATROLREP] • Reconnaissance Exploitation Report [RECCEXREP] • SAEDA Report [SAEDAREP] defined in free text

24. Digitalizing FM 6-99.2 • formulate FM 6-99.2 definitions computationally • enable computational cross-reference FM 6-99.2 documents with comparable sets of documents prepared by other commands. • use results for computer-aided aggregation of the represented data, cross-checking for mismatches, identifying suspect sources, and so forth.

25. DoD Instruction 8320.02, August 5, 2013Sharing Data, Information, and Information Technology (IT) Services in the Department of Defense • requires that ‘all salient metadata be discoverable, searchable, and retrievable’ through use of the DSE • Even if all authoritative sources are registered at DSE, it does not achieve its goal because • Heterogeneous definitions and descriptions • No benefits of inferencing and of rapid introduction and definition of new terms • IAO will go some way to solving these problems through semantic tagging

26. top level mid-level (generic hub) domain level (spokes populating downwards) Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) Each module built by downward population from its parent

27. Continuant BFO IAO Generically Dependent Continuant Independent Continuant Specifically Dependent Continuant Material Entity Quality Information Content Entity Information Quality Entity Information Bearing Entity concretized_by depends_on

28. Generically Dependent Continuant Independent Continuant Specifically Dependent Continuant Material Entity Quality Information Content Entity Information Quality Entity Information Bearing Entity concretized_by depends_on universals this pdf file, that Target Value Matrix this hard drive, that book this excitation pattern, that pattern of piles of ink instances

29. BFO: Specifically Dependent Continuant BFO: Generically Dependent Continuant BFO: Independent Continuant IAO and BFO Information Bearing Entity (IBE) Information Structure Entity (ISE) Information Content Entity (ICE) Information Quality Entity (Pattern) (IQE)

30. Example of IAO-Intel Organization

31. DSGS-A Ontologies • US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A) Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative as part of a strategy for the horizontal integration of many different types of warfighter intelligence data DSGS-A Ontologies providing a common framework for • Explica­tionof general terms used in source intelligence artifacts and in data models, terminologies and doctrinal publications which provide typo­logies of intelligence-related IAs to semantically enhance data in a way that enables computational integration and reasoning • Annotationof the instance-level information captured by such IAs to aid retrieval of information about specific persons, groups, events, documents, images, and so forth

32. Acknowledgements Thanks are due also to Mathias Brochhausen, Werner Ceusters, MélanieCourtot, Janna Hastings, James Malone, Bjoern Peters, Jonathan Rees, and Alan Ruttenberg for their work on IAO.