Our Ontologies

NuVio is VIStology's foundational — or upper — ontology: the small, domain-neutral layer of categories on which the company's domain and application ontologies are grounded. It is deliberately compact. A single root class, Entity, is declared equivalent to the union of its seven direct subclasses — Situation, Object, Process, Attribute, Value, UnitOfMeasure and InformationEntity — and those seven are asserted pairwise disjoint, so every individual in a NuVio-based model falls into exactly one of them. In all, NuVio declares 13 classes, 18 object properties, and 3 datatype properties. It is published as OWL at cogradio.org/ont/Nuvio.owl, and its own metadata records it as a foundational ontology developed by Northeastern University and VIStology, Inc. CRO2 — the rebuilt Cognitive Radio Ontology — imports it.

Relevance is a first-class construct. A NuVio Situation is not a bag of facts: it is constrained to point, via relevantIndividual, at the entities that actually matter to it. That is the same relevance obligation that runs through all of VIStology's situation-awareness work — see Situation Awareness & Command and Control — and the ontology's own annotation traces the constraint back to Situation Theory.

Reports are separated from the things they report on. InformationEntity sits beside Object and Process rather than inside them, and splits into InformationContent and InformationRepresentation. This is what lets a NuVio-grounded model distinguish a message about a radio from the radio, and the content of that message from the language it happens to be written in — a distinction that any system reasoning over sensor reports, policies, or intelligence products needs in order to stay honest about what it actually knows.

Measurement is modeled, not hard-coded. Quantity (an attribute that can be measured) is kept apart from Quality (one that cannot), and quantities carry a Value that in turn carries a UnitOfMeasure, with a DimensionlessUnit branch for decibels, angles, ratios, and counts. NuVio's own annotations state that this block is modeled after QUDT. In a spectrum or radio ontology, this is what makes a frequency comparable across systems that report it in different units — see Dynamic Spectrum Sharing & Cognitive Radio.

An OWL formalization of Barwise & Perry's Situation Theory, providing the formal primitives — situations, objects, relations, attributes, and roles — that underpin higher-level information fusion and situation-aware reasoning. STO enables systems to represent and reason about situations as first-class semantic entities, rather than simply collecting facts.

A domain-independent core ontology providing the reusable foundation for situation awareness applications. Introduced at FUSION'03 and extended across more than a decade of VIStology research, SAW Core is the backbone of the SAWA (Situation Awareness Assistant) system and has shaped how the information-fusion community formalizes situation awareness.

An OWL ontology automatically generated from NATO's Joint Consultation, Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM). By bringing this coalition C2 standard into the semantic web stack, the ontology enables formal reasoning, consistency checking, and interoperability across allied command and control systems.

Ontologies capturing the Metadata Description Language (MDL) and Telemetry Attribute Transfer Standard (TMATS) used throughout flight test and telemetering. They enable semantic validation of T&E data, cross-vendor interoperability in iNET-based systems, and have served as the formal substrate for TACL — a proposed standard T&E constraint language.

An OWL ontology capturing the concepts, parameters, and behaviors of cognitive radios — the shared vocabulary that allows heterogeneous radios, policy engines, and reasoning components to describe capabilities and negotiate configurations. CRO was developed under the auspices of the Wireless Innovation Forum (formerly the SDR Forum), whose Modeling Language for Mobility Working Group approved Description of the Cognitive Radio Ontology (WINNF-10-S-0007) in September 2010. VIStology's president, Dr. Mieczyslaw Kokar, was its principal author and co-chaired that working group; representing VIStology, he went on to lead the Forum's Cognitive Radio Ontology project. VIStology and its collaborators later rebuilt the ontology as CRO2, grounded on VIStology's NuVio foundational ontology and published at cogradio.org. It remains a central reference point for ontology-based approaches to cognitive radio and has been applied across a range of policy-driven adaptation and spectrum-sharing systems — see Dynamic Spectrum Sharing & Cognitive Radio.

An ontology for describing cognitive radio functions and RF-based microservices. DeVISor enables standardized semantic discovery and invocation of RF capabilities across heterogeneous platforms, supporting dynamic composition of radio services based on declared capabilities rather than hard-coded interfaces.

The ontological foundation for a proposed standard for exchanging Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) knowledge and interpreting spectrum access policies. SpectralSPARQL enables collaborative, dynamic spectrum sharing by making spectrum-access rules and observations machine-interpretable and queryable through semantic reasoning.