Information Engineering in Support of Multilateral Joint Operational Interoperability

In the information age era, there never has been a better time to reflect upon the fact that information in itself is something that has to be engineered. Since command and control is a cognitive process by which the commander gains situation awareness and proceeds to deliberated and co-ordinated action, one has to ask himself how raw data turns into actual information, and eventually knowledge that will trigger human understanding. Furthermore, the question arises as to how C4ISR system of systems can support this transformation process. Of course, this is no magic. Information systems do the only thing they are good at: Working on large amounts of data at incredible speed. This is where the human fails. However, data must be aggregated in such a way that it results in information that conveys operational meaning to the commander. This is where information technologies alone fail, miserably. The resulting information must capture the semantics of the commander's domain of interest, and this must exist prior the automated data transformation process. The exercise of capturing the semantics of a certain business domain (the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) along with its usage guidance (business rules) can be referred to as information engineering or ontology engineering. Conducting information engineering activities comes in support of the definition of ontologies. By definition, an ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them. Broadly speaking, interoperability can be achieved for systems that sit on top of a single common ontology, or for systems that sit on top of distinct ontologies provided with a means of translation between the crossing domains. Presented at the Meeting on Coalition C4ISR Architectures and Information Exchange Capabilities (Les architectures C4ISR et les capacites d'echange d'information en coalition), held in The Hague, The Netherlands, on 27-28 Sep 2004. Published in the Proceedings of the Meeting, p18-1 through 18-8, 2004. Document includes briefing charts in addition to text. See also ADM202135, RTO-MP-IST-042. The original document contains color images.