Horizontal Integration of Warfighter Intelligence Data: A Shared Semantic Resource for the Intelligence Community

We describe a strategy that is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. The strategy rests on the development of a set of ontologies that are being incrementally applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We show how the strategy can help to overcome familiar tendencies to stovepiping of intelligence data, and describe how it can be applied in an agile fashion to new data resources in ways that address immediate needs of intelligence analysts.