Force Templates for Assimilating Unit Infospheres

The Force Template will provide JBI management processes with the semantic content they require. But determination of what those processes are, and hence what information and interactions the FT mechanism must support, requires experimentation with aworking infosphere and these semantic models will inevitably change over time. What is required is a flexible approach to building Force Templates that includes semantic content with sufficient richness to provide a means to experiment with, and validate,the overall approach to the use of Force Templates in a JBI.By using the right methodologies and design patterns combined with semantic structures derived from earlier efforts to address the problem information dissemination management, we will be able to make significant progress in developing and demonstrating arobust and powerful Force Template mechanism.. Specifically, we propose to (1) define a structure with the flexibility to handle a wide range of semantic content in regard to describing units and organizations, (2) leverage previous work to provide aspecification of a first-generation semantic content, and (3) specify both the basic FT design and the semantic content in a manner that will allow code generation of a prototype system directly from the specifications in Phase II. The result of this effort will be a flexible and easily tailored approach to Force Templates. The use of ontological patterns consistent with code-generation tools will speed up and reduce risk in terms of the Phase II effort. The ontologies themselveswill provide a powerful semantic base for describing unit/organizational capabilities and needs.