Consistency Is Not Coherence: Orientation Search for Certified Alignments Between 4D Defence Upper Ontologies

Abstract

We align three upper ontologies that sit under UK and NATO defence data infrastructure: the Information Exchange Standard (IES), the Higher Quality Data Model (HQDM) that underpins the National Digital Twin, and Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). No public alignment between IES and HQDM existed. Promoting a hand-curated 17-correspondence crosswalk to OWL and reasoning over the complete merged ontologies with HermiT produces three results that we believe matter beyond this pair.