There have been significant advancements in the development of semantic web technologies over the last ten years. The state-of-the-art in terms of standardized ontology development, ontology alignment and the development of ontology design patterns has matured to the point that they are ready for application within specific communities of interest. We have seen the emergence of academic applications of semantic web technologies in the logistics domain. This research and development effort provides an opportunity for further development and application in an industrial setting that could have significant impact on Air Force operations. The goals of this research are to apply developed ontology design techniques within the Air Force logistics community of interest for agile combat support. Specific objectives include: 1) the development of logistics ontologies to support Air Force logistics processes and web services discovery, 2) the demonstration of alignment techniques, ontology design patterns and schema-ontology mappings in ontology development for the logistics domain, 3) research aimed at advancing the state-of-the art in automation of these techniques, 4) exploration of privacy/security approaches for logistics database analyses, and 5) development and demonstration of an integrated architecture for knowledge based analysis in logistics.
Benefits: The prototype developed under this effort will support technology refresh and migration for existing Air Force logistics systems. The ontological based development will ensure cross database analyses that provide key insights for agile combat support.
Keywords: semantics, ontologies, databases, graph databases, privacy aware computing, ontological design patterns.
