Defence semantic interoperability

SynapseCommand Operational Ontology

The SynapseCommand Operational Ontology is a draft public terminological vocabulary that gives operational concepts, relationships and identifiers stable meaning across translated sources.

Version 0.1.0Draft
Semantic role

Common syntax is not common meaning

Two sources can produce records with the same shape while using terms and relationships differently. The Operational Ontology supplies governed classes, relationships, hierarchy, labels, definitions and stable identifiers so those meanings can be inspected.

It is a terminological vocabulary, not a store of operational instances and not a reasoner. It contains no inference rules. Mapping a third-party vocabulary onto it is a governed human decision, not an automatic assertion by the validator.

Eight public Turtle modules

The repository authority is split into 8 modules. A generated JSON-LD context and packaged ontology-term registry are checked against them.

  • core
  • pnt
  • air
  • logistics
  • isr
  • c2
  • mission
  • decision
Conceptual architecture

Shape, meaning and decision logic remain distinct

This is a conceptual separation of responsibilities. A deployment does not need to exercise every adapter or semantic feature for every record.

  1. External layer

    External systems, standards and feeds

    Source formats remain authoritative for their own wire semantics.

  2. Public layer

    Public adapters

    Translate source records into the public canonical layer and, where supported, back out.

  3. Public layer

    Canonical Data Model (CDM)

    Defines the normalised record shape.

  4. Public layer

    SC-OES + Operational Ontology

    Define assertion semantics and governed operational meaning.

  5. Private layer

    SynapseCommand decision runtime

    Applies proprietary reasoning, fusion, scoring and decision support.

The public repository exposes the integration contract and semantic vocabulary. It does not publish the SynapseCommand reasoning, inference, correlation, fusion, scoring or course-of-action runtime.

Governance and versioning

Version 0.1.0 is a draft maintained within the SynapseCommand project by Decent Cybersecurity. Every term in this release is marked EXPERIMENTAL; no term claims STABLE maturity.

Terms are changed through the published ontology-term process. The Turtle modules are authoritative. Derived files are generated, and repository tests reject drift between the source vocabulary, JSON-LD projection and packaged registry.

Status and limits

This is not an official NATO ontology and does not claim that external systems share one universal military ontology. It has not been submitted to, reviewed by or approved by an external standards body. Its public vocabulary does not expose proprietary SynapseCommand reasoning or decision logic.

Inspect the governed vocabulary

The public repository contains the authoritative Turtle modules, generated projections, governance process and drift checks. The documentation provides orientation without replacing those repository artefacts.