| Project Metadata | Keywords | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) design for the total ontology of the elements needed for modeling Irregular Warfare (IW) .
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you arrived here using a keyword shortcut, you may use your browser's "back" key to return to the keyword distribution page.
Return to Hartley's Projects Page