Short paper: Using Formal Ontologies in the Development of Countermeasures for Military Aircraft

This paper describes the development of an ontology for use in a military simulation system. Within the military, aircraft represent a significant investment and these valuable assets need to be protected against various threats. An example of such a threat is shoulder-launched missiles. Such missiles are portable, easy to use and unfortunately, relatively easy to acquire. In order to counter missile attacks, countermeasures are deployed on the aircraft. Such countermeasures are developed, evaluated and deployed with the assistance of modelling and simulation systems. One such system is the Optronic Scene Simulator, an engineering tool that is able to model and evaluate countermeasures in such a way that the results could be used to make recommendations for successful deployment and use. The use of formal ontologies is no longer a foreign concept in the support of information systems. To assist with the simulations performed in the Optronic Scene Simulator, an ontology, Simtology, was developed. Simtology supports the system in various ways such as providing a shared vocabulary, improving the understanding of the concepts in the environment and adding value by providing functionality that improves integration between system components.