HPKB Movement Analysis Ontology
Draft of February 12, 1998

The following summarizes the main points of the partial ontology developed by the Movement Analysis group participants in the second HPKB Battlespace challenge problem SME meeting. The main shape of the structure given below was worked out on February 6, 1998 by Eric Domeshek, Eric Jones, John Gennari, Bill Long, myself, and the UMass representative (my apologies for forgetting the name). I've added a bit of annotation in spots, and based the following on notes taken by Bill Long, myself, and John Gennari. I've revised some of the entries as well, with annotations to explain the changes. This draft supercedes the second draft advertised earlier, mainly by refining the notion of occupation to allow occupation of sites by both units and vehicles. I also have taken the opportunity to fix some typos.

The main entities described below are reports, units, sites, occupations of sites by units, movements, and trends. Each of these entities may have internal and external parameters. This partial ontology does not cover major areas including vehicles, weapons, equipment, trafficability notions, etc.

The aim is that reports appear in the same form, whether they are system inputs given in the stream of simulated intelligence reports or system outputs given in the stream of notifications. Input reports will provide order of battle information about relevant units, information about known sites, and observations of vehicles, movements, and sites. Output reports (notifications) will mainly concern sites sites, movements, and trends. Input and output reports may be partial. Input reports typically will identify the time at which an event occurs with some precision. Output reports may start out very partial and abstract, but be followed up by refined reports of increasing detail and accuracy.

This ontology only covers most of the main points; some main points and many details may have been omitted. Some are under development by other HPKB groups.

• REPORT
  This form for reports needs to be elaborated to allow making disjunctive reports that indicate a probability distribution (or other weighting information).
  • Report ID
  • Report time
    This is the time at which the report is issued. It normally is no earlier than the time of the event being reported. The time or duration of the event being reported will be described in a manner appropriate to the report subclass (e.g., occupations reported with a duration, unit strength reported at some particular time).
  • Subclass
    Other subclasses may appear in simulated input stream, the SASIS (Simulated All-Source Intelligence Stream)
    • Unit
    • Site
    • Occupation
    • Movement
    • Trend
• UNIT
  Units may be either abstract, as in doctrine, or concrete, as in units actually deployed. Concrete units will have properties that vary with time, and the needed descriptions refer to both properties holding initially of the unit and at the current (or other) time.
  • Military
    • Nominal or initial properties
      • Name
      • Components
        This describes the order of battle (OB), the constitution of the unit (OPCOM); types of vehicles, equipment, personnel, the numbers of each of these, and their command and control relationships.
      • Vehicles
        A list of vehicle type/count pairs
      • Strength
        Number of vehicles in unit.
      • Echelon
        • Corps
        • Division
        • Brigade
        • Battalion
        • Company
        • Battery
        • Platoon
      • Type
        Are there others?
        • Mechanized infantry
        • Armor
        • Infantry
        • Engineering
        • Support
    • Actual or time-varying properties
      • Components
        A list of OPCONed units (often same as OB)
      • Vehicles
        A list of vehicle type/count pairs
      • Strength
        The current number of vehicles expressed as a percentage of the initial number of vehicles.
      • Battle position
        • Front
        • First echelon
        • Second echelon
        • Reserve
        • Are there others?
      • Mission/intent
        This needs to be elaborated
  • Nonmilitary
• SITE
  This includes roads and road segments.
  • Properties
    • Location
      This may be either a point, line, or area, in GIS format.
    • Terrain character
      There is a large subvocabulary here for different terrain characteristics, GIS type info.
    • Vehicles
      The number of vehicles on site. This is correlated with unit strengths by the Occupation relation.
    • Improvements
      This includes revetments, drainage, etc.
    • Damage
      Alphatech is developing a vocabulary for damage descriptors.
    • Function
      • Command post
        • Tactical
        • Main
        • Rear
          Battalions don't have rear command posts, but division and corp echelons do.
      • Logistics
        • Fuel
        • Ammo
        • Special ammo
          This means nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
        • Food
        • Maintenance
        • Field train
        • Combat train
      • Artillery
        • Long range
        • Multiple rocket launchers (MRL)
        • Short range
      • Surface to surface missles (SSM)
      • Land based cruise missle (LBCM)
      • Air defense artillery (ADA)
        • SAMs
        • Guns
      • Battle positions
        Is this category of function placed properly or needed?
        • Tank units
        • Mechanized units
        • Combat engineer units
      • Assembly/staging area
      • Area of operations (AO)
      • Major Supply Route (MSR)
• OCCUPATION
  This is a relation or reified association between occupying entities and sites for periods of time. For example, one might report a command post as an occupation of a site by a command company.
  • Subclasses
    • Vehicle
    • Unit
  • Properties
    • Site
    • Duration
      • Start time
      • End time
• MOVEMENT
  Movements have several main subtypes. Any of these subtypes may exhibit the variety of properties.
  • Subclasses
    The three dimensions of organized, military, and unit can be combined as needed. Examples include military convoys, police formations, and flight of civilians.
    • Organized
      This indicates motion occurring in some regular spatiotemporal pattern.
      • Convoy
      • Formation
        • Column
        • Wedge
    • Disorganized
    • Military
    • Non-military
      This includes police, firefighters, etc., as well as ordinary civilians.
    • Unit movement
      This subtype is for a unit moving in its entirety.
      • Unit in motion
    • Unit fragment
      This subtype is for a part of a unit moving on its own.
      • Parent unit
  • Properties
    • Size
      Number of vehicles
    • Vehicles
      List of vehicle type/count pairs
    • Path
      • List of sites
        • Origin
        • Intermediate sites
        • Destination
      • List of occupations
        This list encodes ordering of sites occupied, including both motion and rest.
        • Start time
        • End time
        • Duration
    • Purpose
      • Deploy
        Put units into position
      • Displace
        Move units to new positions to avoid targeting
      • Resupply
        Bring supplies to or from deployed units
      • Tactical
        • Attack
        • Retreat
• TREND
  • Derivative
    • Qualitative type
      • Increasing
      • Decreasing
      • Anomalous
    • Rate
  • Subclasses
    • Traffic trend
      • Road
        A site that is a road segment
      • Attribute
        • Traffic volume
        • Traffic speed
        • Traffic congestion