Development of a Cyber Effects Ontology for Use in Military Simulation
Published in University of New South Wales Honours Thesis, 2015
The rise of Information Technology enabled military forces and the subsequent development of cyber warfare capabilities means that our military forces are facing the ever increasing threat of being required to fight in an information-degraded environment in the aftermath of a cyber attack. This ability to fight through a cyber attack is directly dependent on the resilience of the digital networks of the attacked force. To build resilience, militaries need to increase their cyber situational awareness and begin preparing for the probable and plausible futures facing their networked systems. Preparedness will grant resilience when the time comes that a deployed force comes under sustained and effective cyber attack. To the end of predicting these futures, this thesis identifies how these future states can be predicted and identified the underlying requirement for a transparent and comprehensive knowledge representation to support this. This thesis will identify a novel method for ontology development towards building a solution to this problem. The proposed Agilitology is the first ontology development approach to apply an agile, usecase-centric development methodology. The Agilitology approach is then used to construct the Cyber Effects Simulation Ontology. The Cyber Effects Simulation Ontology and its two component sub-ontologies: the Cyber Simulation Terrain and the Threat Simulation Ontology are able to effectively, transparently and comprehensively represent cyber effects on military systems in a simulation context. These novel ontologies are applied to a test usecase drawn from a hypothetical military combat scenario to demonstrate the functionality and utility of the Cyber Effects Simulation Ontology before defining future research directions and applications of this work.
@mastersthesis{osullivan2015,
title={Development of a Cyber Effects Ontology for Use in Military Simulation},
author={O'Sullivan, Kent Daniel},
year={2015},
school={University of New South Wales}
}