Towards a NATO Lessons Learned Ontology

Lessons capture knowledge about events, actions taken and their consequences. They describe errors committed in the past that shall not be repeated in the future as well as successes and how they can be repeated. In both cases lessons may provide an advantage in future missions. They can be shared within an organisation, and across cooperating organisations providing decision makers with relevant knowledge of past experience. Being able to offer the right lessons in the right situation to the right decision makers is crucial for unlocking their benefits. However, much of the relevant content in lessons is stored is in the form of unstructured text that leads to inconveniences in their re-use. The Lessons Learned ontology project aims at enriching these lessons semantically, hence upgrading keyword-based search to semantic search, enabling the use of context information and leveraging organisational learning. This article presents potential use cases and requirements for a Lessons Learned ontology, scientific and organisational challenges for its development as well as an overview of advanced and promising methods and technologies that may create value for a future Lessons Learned ecosystem.