JC3-TIME: Event and Temporal Reasoning Ontology

Modus Operandi proposes the development of JC3-TIME, an ontology and innovative framework for representing and extracting temporal/event information and temporal reasoning that support intelligence analysis through event correlation and all source fusion in operational (large scale) settings. Identification of patterns in the enemy’s behavior is critical to disrupting his activities. Intelligence analysts are currently swamped with information from a wide variety of sources, but this abundance of information hasn’t paid off to its fullest extent because of the tremendous amount of manual (human) processing required to analyze it. Research in information extraction from natural language texts can greatly reduce this manual effort by automatically extracting descriptions of militarily-significant events and their temporal features from intelligence data. Furthermore, if the event descriptions are stored within a semantic model, i.e., ontology, then machine reasoning algorithms can be applied to generate the implicit event relationships currently requiring human effort. This capability will significantly reduce manual processing of intelligence that currently plagues Army analysts.