Semantic Web technologies for aerospace

Emerging Semantic Web technology such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) will support advanced semantic interoperability in the next generation of aerospace architectures. The basic idea of DAML is to mark up artifacts (e.g., documents, sensors, databases, legacy software) so that software agents can interpret and reason with the information. DAML will support the representation of ontologies (which include taxonomies of terms and semantic relations) via extensions to XML. XML alone is not sufficient for agents because it provides only syntactic interoperability that depends on implicit semantic agreements. DAML is the official starting point for the Web Ontology Language, an emerging standard from the World Wide Web Consortium. This paper will cover promising aerospace applications and significant challenges for Semantic Web technologies. Potential applications include higher-level information fusion, collaboration in both operational and engineering environments and rapid systems integration. The challenges that will be discussed include the complexity of ontology development, automation of markup, semantic mismatch between current object-oriented models and Semantic Web ontologies, scalability issues related to reasoning with large knowledge bases and technology transition issues. The paper will explain ongoing research that is focused on addressing these challenges.