From Battle Management Language (BML) to automatic information fusion

Abstract

Current operations, military as well as disaster relief operations, are executed by coalition forces which have to exchange information effectively. This exchange must be supported by a smart architecture of the underlying network and its systems and by a specific language format used to formulate military communications, i.e., orders, requests and especially reports. Such a language format has to support automatic processing of the communication as well as automatic information fusion. Otherwise, the forces' headquarters would only accumulate huge piles of data without any chance to analyze them in time, i.e., quickly enough to exploit those fleeting opportunities permitted by the enemy or by circumstance. The language format, we propose is Battle Management Language (BML). A Battle Management Language is an unambiguous language to be used for communications among C2-systems - systems to support the military process of command and control -, their users, simulation systems and robotic forces. BML expressions can be processed automatically by parsers as defined in the field of computational linguistics. The output of the parsers are so-called "feature-value matrices" in which the information is represented in a XML-like structure. This paper will point out and illustrate by example how the feature-value representation of BML reports can be exploited for automated information fusion.