ABSTRACT
Irregular Warfare (IW) operations are difficult because they are so intimately connected to the human domain, where our understanding is weak, as opposed to the physical domain, where our understanding is strong. Accordingly, IW modeling is difficult. Not only is our understanding of the human domain weak, but also the knowledge we do have is scattered over many academic disciplines and the research produced is not oriented toward the needs of modeling. However, the realities of recent conflicts have produced new demands for models that represent IW operations. Ontologies provide a tool for representing descriptions of what we know and what we would like to know about IW. They can be used to formally specify controlled vocabularies and to unambiguously describe semantic relationships. In this paper, we describe a set of ontologies that describe IW actor, action, and environment concepts and state variables derived from the concepts. These ontologies were derived from other taxonomies and ontologies, as well as from literary sources. We attached semantics to these ontologies to permit programmatic inferencing concerning the vocabulary of the ontologies. These ontologies are potentially useful for model development activities including conceptual modeling, data interchange, interoperability, and verification and validation.
