The Use of Ontologies to Support Intelligence Analysis

Abstract

For some years now, the Intelligence Community has been using XML “tagging” of documents in an effort to make the documents more usable for data discovery, sharing, and other processing. In implementing a system (METS) which automates the identification of relevant data in documents, we noted several limitations of that XML tagging approach, and therefore chose to also provide an OWL ontology-based representation of that data. Here, we discuss the goals of METS, those XML limitations, and the OWL approach, showing how the latter should support better analysis. (As we discuss, clients have thus far not made use of the OWL results, so the benefits are still hypothetical.) We also discuss issues we encountered in developing the ontologies, outline the design and use of the operational METS for processing message feeds and other documents, and conclude with future plans which include greater ontology coordination and sharing, and assisting with the incorporation of tools for benefiting from the semantic information provided by the OWL.