Independent Review of Emerging Semantic Web Technologies Supporting the Defense Training Environment

The Department of Defense is working at all levels to rationalize its data management strategy (Stenbit, 2003). However, though this strategy is broad in its application, its reach has thus far not extended to specialized areas of interest such as modeling and simulation. Now, however, the rapid development of net-centric technologies and methods provides new opportunities for the modeling and simulation community within the DoD and in fact offers opportunities to bring together communities of practice (such as C2, logistics) in ways that can help to bring greater coordination in use of data and systems and enable more rapid configuration of models that can bridge separate domains. The specific components that we shall address here include: 1. Ontologies 2. Strategy for the identification and treatment of authoritative data 3. Service oriented architectures (including Web Services) 4. Semantic search 5. Reasoning and analysis engines 6. Data Interoperability