Rapid Creation and Deployment of Communities of Interest Using the CMap Ontology Editor and the KAoS Policy Services Framework

Sharing information across diverse teams is increasingly important in military operations, intelligence analysis, emergency response, and multi-institutional scientific studies. Communities of Interest (COIs) are an approach by which such information sharing can be realized. Widespread adoption of COIs has been hampered by a lack of adequate methodologies and software tools to support the COI lifecycle. After describing this lifecycle and associated dataflows, this article defines requirements for tools to support the COI lifecycle and presents a prototype implementation. An important result of our research was to show how consistent use of ontologies in the COI support tools could add significant flexibility, efficiency, and representational richness to the process. Our COITool prototype supports the major element of the COI lifecycle through graphical capture and sharing COI configurations represented in OWL through the IHMC CMap Ontology Editor (COE), facilitation of the COI implementation through integration with the AFRL Information Management System (IMS) and IHMC’s KAoS Policy Services framework, and the reuse of COI models. In order to evaluate our tools and methodology, an example METOC (weather) community of interest was developed using it.