Purpose
The purpose of this site is to facilitate the rapid exploitation of the methods of ontology by the U.S. Military, for the purposes of:
Providing an ontological resource to support representing, defining, and relating constituent elements in various military domains
Identifying best practices in ontology development and creating a repeatable process
Creating interoperable and consistent semantics in a modular fashion
Providing an ontological resource to support representing, defining, and relating constituent elements in various military domains
Identifying best practices in ontology development and creating a repeatable process
Creating interoperable and consistent semantics in a modular fashion
Military Ontology is...
The science of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in military domains
Advanced by the cultivation of a discipline that is devoted precisely to the representation of entities as they exist in reality
A definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in a given military domain
The provision of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain
The formulation of a common controlled vocabulary for Commanders, War-Planners, Operators, and Doctrine Writers
A shared resource for disparate communities to communicate with each other
A tool for collaborative development supporting the integration of information and facilitating knowledge discovery
Military Ontology has been practiced by Commanders and War Planners since the dawn of organized warfare. In the book On War, Clausewitz wrote about the need to develop situational awareness (and Situational Understanding) through the practice of mereology (the theory of part-hood relations):
"...three quarters of the information upon which all actions in War are based on are lying in a fog of uncertainty...The first thing needed here is a fine, piercing mind, to feel the truth with the measure of its judgment..."
“I shall proceed from the simple to the complex...in war more than any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together...”
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
National Center for Ontological Research
This work is supported by the National Center for Ontological Research at the University at Buffalo.
Click on the NCOR logo to go to their site.
Click on the NCOR logo to go to their site.
This site is maintained by LTC Bill Mandrick
Click on image to see LTC Mandrick's Military Biography