Integrating military systems using semantic web technologies and lightweight agents

The primary objective when conducting operations according to NATO Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) is to attain information superiority in order to gain increased mission effectiveness. NNEC is based on an idea of a common information space where the information is visible, available, and understandable, and through which the participating information systems supply information for others to utilize and retrieve when needed according to their role. In order to realize this idea, the challenge of integrating information from heterogeneous sources in a highly dynamic environment such as NNEC needs to be addressed. In order to facilitate the necessary information integration in a NNEC setting, we propose a system of lightweight cooperative hybrid agents that rely on using the Semantic Web technology stack as far as possible and are built on top of an efficient peer-to-peer communication layer. The contributions of the work presented in this report are: • A holistic approach for information integration in a highly dynamic setting. • A use case and demonstration of how lightweight hybrid agents utilizing Semantic Web technologies can facilitate on-the-fly, unanticipated information integration from heterogeneous sources with different formats/vocabularies. The approach has been preliminarily tested in the context of the 2011 SOA pilot conducted by FFI.