Responsive, agile, collaborative planning and execution is a key requirement for the development of a successful Network Enabled Capability (NEC), whether at the national or international level. This paper makes the case that it is not possible to achieve this agility without solving the semantic interoperability problem. The semantic issues facing NATO’s Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) are also faced by its members in their national NECs. There are currently many proposed strategies attempting to address these issues. Finding the one that will provide the hoped for integration and at the same time only cause minimal changes to existing infrastructure is a major challenge. In this situation it is vital to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of a strategy. This paper presents the findings from a project tasked with both identifying a strategy and demonstrating its effectiveness - the Joint Tactical Air Defence Integration System (JTADIS) project. This project was funded by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and undertaken by QinetiQ – the semantic analysis was undertaken by BORO Solutions.

There is a well understood requirement for semantic interoperability within NATO and an emerging strategy to address it. One of the strategy’s key components – the ‘semantic description’ – requires further clarification. What is less well recognised is that this ‘semantic description’ can also be viewed as a component of a wider strategic requirement for semantic modernisation. This paper describes how the semantic modernisation techniques of layering and harvesting provide a strong foundation for the production of semantic descriptions. It describes two projects that illustrate how these techniques are being used to do this. Finally, it reflects upon how this could help to refine the current NATO NEC (NNEC) semantic interoperability strategy.

In common with many other government defence departments, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has realised that it has a plethora of legacy systems that were procured as domain specific with little emphasis given to integration requirements. In particular, it realised that the lack of integration between a significant number of the legacy air defence command and control (AD-C2) systems meant it could not deliver the increased agility needed for joint force AD and that current approaches to integration were unlikely to resolve the problem. They realised that they needed a new approach that demonstrably worked. This paper describes a programme initiated by the MoD to address this problem through the formulation of a novel solution and its demonstration in the tactical AD-C2 environment using a sample of these existing legacy systems. It describes the ontological solution deployed to resolve the 'hard' semantic interoperability challenge. It outlines the physical and semantic architecture that was developed to support this approach and describes the implemented planning and collaborative execution (PACE-based) and semantic interoperability engine (SIE) solution.

Presentation of the report 'An Analysis of Services' prepared for the UK MoD.

This describes a forensic approach to developing a common understanding of Service across business and IT.

The goal of this report is to provide an in-depth common conceptual understanding of services end-to-end across the enterprise – one that encompasses business, IT and technical services and gives a picture of what, in essence, a service is. Prepared for the UK MoD in 2010.

This book is motivated by the belief that “a better understanding of ontology, epistemology, and teleology” is essential for enabling Modelling and Simulation (M&S) systems to reach the next level of ‘intelligence’. This chapter focuses on one broad category of M&S systems where the connection is more concrete; ones where building an ontology – and, we shall suggest, an epistemology – as an integrated part of their design will enable them to reach the next level of ‘intelligence’. Within the M&S community, this use of ontology is at an early stage; so there is not yet a clear picture of what this will look like. In particular, there is little or no guidance on the kind of ontological architecture that is needed to bring the expected benefits. This chapter aims to provide guidance by outlining some major concerns that shape the ontology and the options for resolving them. The hope is that paying attention to these concerns during design will lead to a better quality architecture, and so enable more ‘intelligent’ systems. It is also hoped that understanding these concerns will lead to a better understanding of the role of ontology in M&S.

Component breakdowns are a vital multi-purpose tool and hence ubiquitous across a range of disciplines. Information systems need to be capable of storing reasonably accurate representations of these breakdowns. Most current information systems have been designed around specific breakdowns, without considering their general underlying formal structure. This is understandable, given the focus on devising the breakdown and that there is not a readily available formal structure to build upon. We make a step towards providing this structure here.

At the core of the notion of a component breakdown is the component as an integral (dependent) part of the composite whole. This leads to a rich formal structure, one that requires careful consideration to capture well enough to support the range of specific breakdowns. If one is not sufficiently aware of this structure, it is difficult to determine what is required to produce a reasonably accurate representation – in particular, one that is sufficiently accurate to support interoperability.

In this report, enabled by the Construction Innovation Hub, we describe this rich formal structure and develop a framework for assessing how well a data model (or ontology) has captured the main elements of the structure. This will enable people to both assess existing models as well as design new models. As a separate exercise, as an illustration, we develop a data model that captures these elements.

Associated with the notion of component (as an integral, dependent part) is the notion of replaceable part (see Appendix A for more details). We do not characterise this here but will do so in a later report.