Improving Interoperability among Defence and National Security Ontologies: Analysis and Evaluation Tasks

2026-08-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of semantic interoperability in the defense and national security domain, where numerous highly heterogeneous and specialized ontologies impede effective integration. To bridge this gap, the authors systematically analyze over 60 publicly available ontologies and establish the first Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) benchmark track dedicated to this domain, comprising eight alignment tasks. Leveraging multiple state-of-the-art ontology matching systems, they generate automatic alignments, aggregate them into a consensus mapping, and refine the results through expert manual validation to produce a high-quality silver-standard dataset. This work fills a critical void in standardized evaluation for ontology alignment in defense and security contexts, significantly advancing semantic interoperability within the field.

Abstract

The use of ontologies and knowledge graphs is becoming increasingly widespread in the defence and national security domain. Numerous ontologies have been developed through initiatives led by academia, industry, and government. Achieving interoperability across diverse defence and national security ontologies remains a major challenge due to the domain's breadth and specialisation. In this work, we analyse and document over 60 publicly available ontologies and introduce a new track for the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). This track comprises eight matching tasks, consensus alignments and manually-curated (silver-standard) mappings. The consensus alignments are derived by aggregating the outputs of several state-of-the-art ontology alignment systems. The silver-standard is obtained from the manual validation of the consensus alignment together with a subset of the unique mappings (i.e., mappings suggested by only one system).

Problem

• interoperability
• defence ontologies
• national security
• ontology alignment
• knowledge graphs

Innovation

• ontology alignment
• interoperability
• knowledge graphs
• silver-standard mappings
• OAEI