Ontology model for building human-machine teams

Abstract

The paper is purposed to the development of an ontology model for building human-machine teams. Humans and machines must interact and exchange their goals and possibilities to they could become teammates. Enabling such interactions is one of the challenges in the human-machine teaming domain. Ontologies provide means for representation of knowledge required for building human-machine teams, and for support of heterogeneous entities interactions. Application of ontologies to enable human-machine interactions determines the relevance of the research purpose. Ontology development methodologies that follow the idea of creating an ontology based on competency questions underlie the ontology development approach described in this paper. The paper presents an overview of the studies that put forward requirements to the kinds of knowledge that the human and machines need to organize a team. Based on this overview and the formulated set of competency questions, an ontology model for building human-machine teams has been developed. This model represents the concepts and relationships relevant to the problem of building human-machine teams, suggests mechanisms that humans and machines are required to possess in order to participate in team building, and enables context-aware human-machine interactions. The novelty of the present research is in the integration of the kinds of knowledge found in the analyzed studies into the ontology model. The scope of the application of the research results covers the domains of ontology development and building heterogeneous groups of the micro-level behavior.