Semantic Information Management Control of Mission Asset State Changes

Managing state changes for semantically represented mission assets can be complex and burdensome. Standard practice simplifies updating state-based relationships by performing sequential delete and add operations, or by creating a new instance of the asset with updated state values. The former is inflexible and constraining as it eliminates historical state tracing, making it impossible to implement state provenance and advanced semantic queries. The latter causes mass duplication of non-stateful attributes while requiring asset redefinitions upon each stateful relationship change event. Our research implements an alternative solution by representing the asset definition once and declaring each state change as an instance specialization under the W3C Provenance Ontology Prov-O.