Abstract
The article addresses the question of whether methods from ontology engineering and reasoning can help domain-experts (as opposed to laymen) when mapping concepts from domain-specific vocabularies to each other. The overarching context is military Command & Control systems, and the prospects for fostering interoperability between them. The main contribution of the article is an experiment conducted with senior military officers on mapping two artillery vocabularies to each other. Overall, the evidence is stronger that (i) hierarchical structuring of concepts, (ii) definitions of concepts and (iii) mappings to a common reference vocabulary can help domain-experts to make sound matches than help them avoid unsound ones. However, more research is needed before a verdict can be given. Though the experiment exhibits high ecological validity, using subjects who are experts in the domain of the two vocabularies that are to be mapped to each other, internal validity suffers confounding effects of previous expertise, and reliability is low, due to the low number of subjects (\(N=13\)).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the R&D program of the Swedish Armed Forces. The authors are particularly grateful to the Swedish National Defence College and Johan Sigholm for the opportunity to conduct the experiment there, as well as to all of the subjects. Furthermore, Lars Lindberg and Pontus Hörling helped improve the experimental setup, and Vahid Mojtahed supported the experiment in his capacity of project manager. Additionally, the manuscript was substantially improved by the comments of two anonymous reviewers. The assistance of Semantic Web Company GmbH in Vienna, who made the PoolParty platform available for the duration of this research, is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Cohen, M., Franke, U. An experiment in ontology use for command and control interoperability. Autom Softw Eng 22, 145–157 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-014-0149-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-014-0149-z