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.

This tutorial provides an illustrative case study of how the BORO methodology has been used to improve precision. The case study looks at work done on the ontology of 'Air Control Means' a construct used in military air traffic control as part of a wider air defence ontology. It has these ontological themes; semantic vagueness, rational reconstruction, increased precision, shift from a pen and paper paradigm, fruitfulness.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

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.

A major challenge faced in the deployment of collaborating unmanned vehicles is enabling the semantic interoperability of sensor data. One aspect of this, where there is significant opportunity for improvement, is characterizing the coordinate systems for sensed position data. We are involved in a proof of concept project that addresses this challenge through a foundational conceptual model using a constructional approach based upon the BORO Foundational Ontology. The model reveals the characteristics as sets of options for configuring the coordinate systems. This paper examines how these options involve, ontologically, ascending levels. It identifies two types of levels, the well-known type levels and the less wellknown tuple/relation levels.

Within the surface ship community, there is a significant amount of content describing Geospatial and Temporal References (G&TR); Def Stan 22-61 is the prime example. However, from an information modelling perspective, much of this is unstructured. And where it is structured, it reflects a data implementation rather than an information modelling perspective; in MDA terms, a platform-specific model rather than a computation-independent model perspective. It aims at describing how G&TR data should be used, but has not been so directly aimed at describing what G&TR is – the target of an information model. This has led to a situation where a solid foundation for the information model is missing and there is no clear articulation of the fundamental components for the information model. This analysis provides a sketch that can be developed into an information model that would provide the foundation for the ‘how’ model in Def Stan 21-66. The combined models would provide a better, more accurate, overall model.