Probabilistic Ontologies for Multi-INT Fusion

Systems are increasingly required to fuse data from geographically dispersed, heterogeneous information sources to produce up-to-date, mission-relevant results. These products focus not only on traditional military forces and systems, but to an increasing degree also on non-traditional combatants and their social networks. Successful multi-INT fusion requires that the constituent systems interoperate not just at the level of syntax and formats, but also at the level of semantics. Ontologies are vital enablers for semantic interoperability. Because uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of multi-INT fusion, lack of support for uncertainty is a major limitation of current-generation ontology formalisms. Probabilistic OWL (PR-OWL) extends the OWL Web Ontology Language to enable the construction of probabilistic ontologies. Ontologies constructed in PR-OWL can represent complex patterns of evidential relationships among uncertain hypotheses. Recently, a system for specifying and reasoning with PR-OWL ontologies has been released in beta version. This paper describes the PR-OWL ontology language, the probabilistic logic on which it is based, and the reasoning system implementation. A hypothetical case study in the counterterrorism domain illustrates the capabilities of PR-OWL.