Evolving Use of Distributed Semantics to Achieve Net-centricity

For the US Department of Defense (DoD)'s efforts to achieve net-centricity, more intelligent ways of handling information must be pursued, in particular using machine- interpretable semantic models, i.e., ontologies. One approach, which we've adopted in current and emerging research projects, is to combine Semantic Web technologies with logic programming, thereby utilizing standards-based ontologies and rules and yet ensuring that the runtime automated reasoning over these is efficient. In this paper, we discuss our current Semantic Environment for Enterprise Reasoning (SEER) architecture, which combines an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with our Semantic Web Ontologies and Rules for Interoperability with Efficient Reasoning (SWORIER) system. SWORIER converts OWL ontologies and SWRL rules into logic programming, thereby enabling efficient runtime reasoning using Prolog. We also briefly discuss potential enhancements to such an environment, including the use of constraint logic, meta- reasoning, and hybrid logic.