Eric Little

Designing ontologies for higher level fusion

The purpose of higher level fusion is to produce contextual understanding of the states of the environment and prediction of their impact in relation to specific goals of decision makers. One of the main challenges of designing higher level fusion processes is to provide a formal structure of domain-specific types of entities, attributes, situations, and the relations between them for reasoning about situations and threats. This paper presents an attempt at confronting this challenge by describing a process for building formal ontologies that combines a top-down philosophical perspective (from the most abstract levels to domain-specific levels) with a bottom-up application-based perspective (from domain-specific levels to the most abstract levels). The main focus of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for formally capturing various sorts of complex relation-types, which can serve as a means for a more thorough decomposition of objects, attributes/properties, events, processes, and relations, necessary for higher level fusion processing.

Ontology meta-model for building a situational picture of catastrophic events

The overall goal of the research described in this paper is to design a general methodology for situation assessment to support crisis management. The purpose of situation assessment is to produce contextual understanding and interpretation of the relationships between various entities, events and behaviors of interest. One of the main challenges of designing a situation assessment process is to provide a formal structure for ontological analyses of domain-specific types of entities, attributes, situations, and the relationships between them. This paper presents an attempt to confront this challenge by utilizing formal philosophical categories and theories to design a formal ontology of catastrophic events that describe the most basic and relevant structures of objective reality. The ontology is designed from both a top-down philosophical perspective (from abstract level to domain-specific level) and a bottom-up application-based perspective (from domain-specific level to abstract level). Situations are characterized by spatial items of interest (SNAP) at different levels of granularity (objects, aggregates, combination of aggregates), temporal items of interest (SPAN) that characterize the behaviors of SNAP items, and the relations between them.

An Ontological Analysis of Threat and Vulnerability

The overall goal of this paper is to provide a formal ontological analysis of threat. In particular, this paper discusses the formal ontological structure of threats as integrated wholes possessing three interrelated parts: intentions, capabilities and opportunities, and shows how these elements stand to one another, as well as to states of vulnerability. This discussion offers a means for understanding variations of threat conditions such as potential vs. viable threats and dispersed threats. A general, metaphysical, upper-level framework for the development of a formal threat ontology (ThrO) offers a necessary foundation for designing consistent and comprehensive models for threat prediction and mitigation

On the Integration of Cognitive Work Analysis within a Multisource Information Fusion Development Methodology

This research explored the means by which methods in cognitive engineering, namely, work domain analysis, could be used to provide input to the development of advanced information processing, or multisensor information fusion, algorithms. Specifically, a work domain analysis of an emergency management environment (in a post-earthquake context) was performed, and linked abstraction hierarchy models representing the emergency management and response system, the physical environment (e.g., buildings, transportation systems, civilians), and other goal directed agents (e.g., civilian responders and volunteers) were created. Outputs from that analysis (information requirements) were input to the design of the information processing algorithms, providing guidance as to the nature of information required by decision makers, which could be computed through fusion capabilities. This ongoing work thus presents an example of an integrated cognitive engineering/multisensor fusion methodology.