Draft:Common Core Ontologies

The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) are a suite of 11 ontologies that are designed to be applicable to a wide range of subjects. CCO was first developed by defense contractor CUBRC thanks to an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination grant. CCO is an extension of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), so all classes in CCO are subclasses of ones found in BFO, and it adopts BFO’s generic relations. It is used in a variety of domains, such as for cyber entities, commercial exchange, space, land combat, and ground vehicle systems. Maintenance of CCO is overseen by the Common Core Governance Board.

CCO is a mid-level ontology, meaning it represents entities at a lower level of generality than upper-level ontologies and at a higher level of generality than domain ontologies. The Ontology Standards Working Group submitted IEEE P3195 to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as a proposed standard defining mid-level ontologies. The proposal includes P3195.1, which establishes the Common Core Ontologies as collectively constituting a mid-level ontology.

Along with BFO, CCO was made a baseline standard for ontology work with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and United States Intelligence Community (IC). In April 2023, the joint Department of Defense and Intelligence Community Ontology Working Group (DIOWG) was chartered by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) and the Intelligence Community Chief Data Officer Council. The DIOWG is tasked with "developing coordinated ontologies to set the agreed definitions and standard necessary to make data machine understandable". It is responsible for the recommendation to make CCO a baseline standard. Due to it being a baseline standard, ontology work with the DoD and IC is directed to make use of the common core ontologies as a mid-level ontology to improve understandability, integration, interoperability, and logical consistency.

The ontologies within CCO include:


 * Geospatial Ontology
 * Information Entity Ontology
 * Event Ontology
 * Time Ontology
 * Agent Ontology
 * Quality Ontology
 * Units of Measure Ontology
 * Currency Unit Ontology
 * Facility Ontology
 * Artifact Ontology
 * Extended Relations Ontology

Although not strictly part of CCO, the Modal Relations Ontology (MRO) is an extension of CCO hosted on its official github repository. Some other domain ontologies extending from CCO include:


 * Aircraft Ontology
 * Airforce Aircraft Maintenance Ontology
 * Army Universal Task List Ontology
 * Atmospheric Feature Ontology
 * Cyber Ontology
 * Hydrographic Feature Ontology
 * Legal and Criminal Act Ontology
 * Marine Corps Task List Ontology
 * Military Operations Ontology
 * Mission Planning Ontology
 * Occupation Ontology
 * Outerspace Ontology
 * Physiographic Feature Ontology
 * Sensor Ontology
 * Spacecraft Mission Ontology
 * Spacecraft Ontology
 * Space Event Ontology
 * Space Object Ontology
 * Transportation Infrastructure Ontology
 * Undersea Warfare Ontology
 * Watercraft Ontology