Ontology enabled decision support and situational awareness

This article describes how Technologies from the Semantic Web community can directly and indirectly support Planners in heterogeneous environments of Effects Based Approach to Operations (EBAO). For this firstly the conditions under which these endeavors take place are outlined and specific requirements elaborated. Secondly Decision Supporting functionality of Ontologies and their associated applications for gaining Situational Awareness of a certain Environment are presented where the focus here is on Description Logics (DL) and Alignment. Thirdly to fill the gap of instance inferences, a complex inference is used as a vehicle to demonstrate the portability of ontological functionality into logical systems. In this article the concept of the Situation Calculus is used as a representative and vehicle for complex inferences. This is done for the reason that some inferences require a formalized Knowledge Base to work on. And so does the Situation Calculus, where a Golog interpreter is used as implementation. It is not intended to show the validity or applicability of Golog's capability to infer Courses of Action to achieve given Objectives, but to show that although conceptually orthogonal both technologies and methodologies can be integrated synergistically.