Linked Ontologies for Knowledge Interoperability

When team members collaborate to solve a problem, each brings his or her own set of experiences, beliefs, assumptions, and cultural tenets. This is especially apparent when members come from diverse cultures, e.g., in Joint or Coalition mission planning. Training, doctrine, and leadership can help, but differences and potential for misunderstandings will remain, especially when members are spatially separated, time constrained, or cognitively overloaded. We propose to address this problem by developing and using shared, adaptive ontologies to identify and resolve culture-based misunderstandings. Our Linked Ontologies for Knowledge Interoperability (LOKI) technology will monitor communications among team members, translate between concepts, identify differences among ontologies, and annotate areas present in one ontology but missing from another. The product of our research will be a system containing ontologies for each team member, for the mission planning domain, and for effective teamwork in a multicultural setting. The system will facilitate collaboration by alerting information producers to words and concepts likely to be misconstrued by other team members, and by translating words and concepts into a format more useful to information consumers.