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HARTLEY CONSULTING
Solving
Complex Operational and Organizational Problems

PROJECT: IW Ontology GUI Development

Dr. Dean S. Hartley III


Project Metadata Keywords
Label Name Other Year DurationYrs
Client Hartley Consulting none Commercial
Dates 2014 2
Employer Hartley Consulting
Partner N/A
       
Configuration management
Consequence Management
Data collection
Data Verification & Validation
Database design
DIME/PMESII Modeling
Documentation standards
Geopolitical analysis
Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)
Human factors
Human, Social, Cultural Behavior (HSCB) Modeling
Impact analysis
Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V)
Information storage and retrieval
Irregular Warfare (IW)
Knowledge Management (KM)
Metadata
Model/System integration
Modeling, Simulation & Gaming (MSG)
Network analyses
Ontologies
Operations Other Than War (OOTW)
Software issues
Software reuse
Stability Operations (SASO, SSTR)
Verification, Validation & Accreditation (VV&A)
Warfare modeling

Challenge:

Create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) design for the total ontology of the elements needed for modeling Irregular Warfare (IW) .


Background:

Many IW analysis tasks require tools to describe complex operational environments (OE). TRAC is developing ontologies to support consistent representations of the state of the OE and describe actors performing actions that affect the OE. Ontologies use controlled vocabularies to help formalize the relationships between concepts, simplify information interchange, provide a catalog of variables to use as a starting point, provide common terms to communicate about concepts, and guide efforts to acquire, develop and use data. The TRAC ontologies include Goal-Task-Owner (GTO) sets to describe the tasks performed by organizations to achieve goals and provide Use Cases for the factions that represent various perspectives in IW situations. The initiative is derived from the TRAC IW Metric Ontology project, the Total IW Ontology independent research and development project, and the second TRAC ontology project, IW Ontology 2.

Design:

The underlying ontology content is contained in an Access database, rather than being expressed in the OWL language.  The rationale is that the database can express all the knowledge we have concerning the ontology, which is not possible in an OWL implementation.

IW Ontology GUI Main Menu

The GUI supports three functions, allowing the user to:

The GUI will be implemented as queries and menus within the Access database.  It is designed to make the schema for the database accessible to the user, produce reports that describe the various parts of the ontology, allow for the insertion of additional elements into the ontology, allow for the creation of new GTO Sets for new scenarios, and allow for creation of a restricted ontology using the GTO Sets, Stocks and Flows and Semantic Thesaurus to define the resulting data needs and output variables.

This last item is the main reason for having the GUI.  The user will be able to design a model that fits a given scenario, being assured that the design will include all of the necessary elements for modeling the scenario and for understanding the results.

GUI Implementation

Creating the GUI from the design will require a moderately sized project.  The task structure of the project should include the following elements:

The project should take about one year.


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