The Knowledge Use in DCMF. Repository, Process and Products

Support towards developing interoperable simulation assets has recently been the focus area in the Modelling and Simulation (M&S) community. In that direction conceptual modelling has been recognized as an important step within the simulation development process. Conceptual models will help to improve common understanding between all stakeholders involved in simulation development and thereby being keys to the transformation from user requirements to implemented simulations. DCMF - Defence Conceptual Modelling Framework - is the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI)'s proposal on how to deal with conceptual modelling issues within the military domain. The DCMF is also a project at FOI which tries to create a framework for capturing, analysing and representing conceptual models. These conceptual models are formalised descriptions of military missions, operations or tasks. As such they should be kept generic and applicable to as many military scenarios as possible without any greater loss of critical information. Research on conceptual modelling has been going on at FOI for the past several years within the DCMF project. The project has succeeded to put the basis for a common methodological framework including a conceptual modelling process and a set of other necessary components enabling the development of conceptual models of military operations in a formal way. However, there is still a good amount of work remaining before the framework can be put into operation. The DCMF Process comprises of four major phases which have not been explored to the same level of detail. While the understanding of the early phases is acceptable, this is not the case for the late phases meaning that neither the necessary components nor the detailed process for the Knowledge Use phase has been clearly examined yet. For that reason, the DCMF project has planned to have a clear focus on how such a repository should be designed and organized to warehouse all the DCMF artefacts during its new three years of commission, 2008 - 2010. The underlying document is our first report of the study and the analysis has been carried out with a deeper focus on the later phases of the DCMF Process, and it will therefore discuss the important issues closer to user and usage of this framework. As such, this study tries to draw a map of the Knowledge Use phase in DCMF including: identifying necessary components, defining detailed processes over the interactions between main users and the repository services, introducing architecture for the repository as well as defining the potential artefacts which will be stored and maintained in the repository. We will start by exploring the Knowledge Use phase in detail, and then describing it as a process from four different perspectives: organizational, functional, informational and behavioural thus giving us the ability to model and discuss the aspects of the knowledge use distinctively, from each of the outlined modelling perspectives. Furthermore, we will then take a closer look at the most important products of DCMF being; Knowledge Instances (KI), Knowledge Components (KC) and Conceptual Models (CM). These artefacts will in turn be explored in detail in order to be able to propose the necessary set of the information they have to capture as well as the adequate holders needed for keeping track of that information. These products will be stored, maintained and retrieved by different stakeholders from the DCMF repository. The services and functions which the DCMF repository should provide to make this possible, as well as how these services and functions should be structured in order to facilitate the usage will be discussed. In addition, with this report we wish to inform the community of practice for Conceptual Modelling in M&S about our course of action, as well as presenting the first step towards creating a requirement specification for our further development work.