Policies for Public Domain Ontologies for the Intelligence Community

Numerous RDF vocabularies and OWL, KIF, and other knowledge representation language ontologies have been contributed to the growing body of ontologies available in the public domain over the last ten years. Many of these were created with government-funded research support in the US and EU. Only a small subset is reusable, and fewer are appropriate for use in applications supporting evolving Intelligence Community requirements. This is partly due to decreasing funding available in the US in particular, but also because of lack of well-specified policies for vocabulary management, metadata, and provenance specification. In this paper we will highlight some of the challenges we have faced in developing and attempting to reuse ontologies in support of DARPA and US Department of Defense initiatives, and provide fodder for discussion of requirements for public domain ontologies.