A VoID and Dublin Core Terms description of DISO - the network of defence, intelligence and security ontologies - its subdomain clusters and its member ontologies.
DISO Network - VoID / Dublin Core description
Ontologies relating to agentic AI and (semantic) services.
Environments with electronic devices that are aware of and adapt to human presence, enhancing interaction through context-aware, interconnected systems.
A special case of situation awareness focused on individuals and their immediate context, supporting pervasive computing where services adapt to user context.
Information security strictly within the digital domain: securing assets against digital threats. The largest cluster in DISO.
Digital representations of physical-world entities, environments or processes with two-way data flow between the physical and digital.
Ontologies that standardise data representations to facilitate the exchange and aggregation of data across diverse domains, organisations and systems.
Protecting information in all forms, physical and digital, around the CIA triad of confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Ontologies that bridge domain-specific ontologies and upper-level ontologies.
Ontologies relating to the identification, assessment and management of risk.
Ontologies for robotics and for robotic process automation.
The perception, comprehension and prediction of an environment, its elements and their meaning within dynamic task settings.
Ontologies that model environments at different scales (cities, buildings, homes) with smart or intelligent aspects.
Abstract, general (foundational / top-level) ontologies whose concepts apply across domains to support broad semantic interoperability.
The use of ontologies and knowledge graphs is becoming increasingly widespread in the defence and national security domain. Numerous ontologies have been developed through initiatives led by academia, industry, and government. Achieving interoperability across diverse defence and national security ontologies remains a major challenge due to the domain's breadth and specialisation. In this work, we analyse and document over 60 publicly available ontologies and introduce a new track for the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). This track comprises eight matching tasks, consensus alignments and a subset of manually-curated mappings. The consensus alignments are derived by aggregating the outputs of several state-of-the-art ontology alignment systems.
DISO is a curated collection of publicly available OWL ontologies covering the domains of defence, intelligence and security, organised into subdomain clusters. It was assembled to support a defence, intelligence and security track for the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI).
DISO: Defence, Intelligence and Security Ontologies
LicenseRef-MITRE-ATTACK-ToU AND CC-BY-4.0
Kabul Kurniawan, Andreas Ekelhart, Elmar Kiesling. "An ATT&CK-KG for Linking Cybersecurity Attacks to Adversary Tactics and Techniques." In ISWC 2021 Posters, Demos, and Industry Tracks, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2980, paper363. CEUR-WS.org, 2021. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2980/paper363.pdf
A knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.
Otte, J.N., Beverley, J., and Ruttenberg, A. (2022). BFO: Basic Formal Ontology. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 17–43. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-220262
A small upper-level ontology built around the continuant/occurrent distinction; an ISO/IEC 21838-2 standard.
Rasmussen, M. H., Lefrançois, M., Schneider, G. F., & Pauwels, P. (2021). BOT: the Building Topology Ontology of the W3C Linked Building Data Group. Semantic Web, 12(1), 143–161. IOS Press. https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-200385
A minimal ontology for describing the core topological concepts of a building.
Thanos G. Stavropoulos, Dimitris Vrakas, Danai Vlachava, and Nick Bassiliades. 2012. BOnSAI: a smart building ontology for ambient intelligence. In Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS '12), Article 30, 1–12. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2254129.2254166
A smart-building ontology for ambient intelligence, extending OWL-S and CoDAMoS.
Smart Building Ontology for Ambient Intelligence
Balaji, B., Bhattacharya, A., Fierro, G., Gao, J., Gluck, J., Hong, D., Johansen, A., Koh, J., Ploennigs, J., Agarwal, Y., Bergés, M., Culler, D., Gupta, R. K., Kjærgaard, M. B., Srivastava, M., and Whitehouse, K. (2018). Brick: Metadata schema for portable smart building applications. Applied Energy, 226, 1273–1292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.02.091
An open ontology standardising semantic descriptions of building assets and their relationships.
LicenseRef-MITRE-CAPEC-ToU AND CC-BY-4.0 AND MIT
Kurniawan, K., Kiesling, E., Winkler, D., and Ekelhart, A. (2024). The ICS-SEC KG: An Integrated Cybersecurity Resource for Industrial Control Systems. In: The Semantic Web – ISWC 2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 15233, pp. 153–170. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77847-6_9
A dictionary of known attack patterns used by adversaries to exploit weaknesses.
Common Attack Pattern Enumerations and Classifications
Mark Jensen, Giacomo De Colle, Sean Kindya, Cameron More, Alexander P. Cox, and John Beverley. "The Common Core Ontologies." In Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference (FOIS 2024), Volume 394, pp. 47–58. IOS Press, 2024. DOI: 10.3233/FAIA241292
A suite of mid-level ontologies extending BFO with terms common across domains.
Prestes, E., Carbonera, J. L., Fiorini, S. R., Jorge, V. A. M., Abel, M., Madhavan, R., Locoro, A., Gonçalves, P. J. S., Barreto, M. E., Habib, M. K., Chibani, A., Gérard, S., Amirat, Y., and Schlenoff, C. I. (2013). Towards a core ontology for robotics and automation. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 61(11), 1193–1204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2013.04.005
The IEEE 1872-2015 core ontology for robotics and automation.
Core Ontology for Robotics and Automation
MIT AND LicenseRef-NIST-CPE-Dictionary-PD
Kiesling, E., Ekelhart, A., Kurniawan, K., and Ekaputra, F. (2019). The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity. In C. Ghidini et al. (Eds.), The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11779, pp. 198–214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13
A structured naming scheme for IT systems, software and packages.
CC-BY-4.0 AND MIT AND LicenseRef-MITRE-CVE-Terms-of-Use
Kiesling, E., Ekelhart, A., Kurniawan, K., & Ekaputra, F. (2019). The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity. In The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 11779, pp. 198–214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13
A catalogue of publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
(CC-BY-4.0 OR MIT) AND LicenseRef-FIRST-CVSS-ToU
Kiesling, E., Ekelhart, A., Kurniawan, K., & Ekaputra, F. (2019). The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity. In C. Ghidini et al. (Eds.), The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11779, pp. 198–214). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13
An open framework for rating the severity of security vulnerabilities.
(MIT AND CC-BY-4.0) AND LicenseRef-MITRE-CWE-ToU
Kiesling, E., Ekelhart, A., Kurniawan, K., and Ekaputra, F. (2019). The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity. In: The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11779, pp. 198–214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13
A community-developed list of common software and hardware weakness types.
CC-BY-4.0 AND LicenseRef-OGC-Document-License
Vinasco-Alvarez, D., Samuel, J., Servigne, S., and Gesquiere, G. (2024). Towards an Automated Transformation of an nD Urban Data Model to a Computational Ontology Network: From UML to OWL, From CityGML 3.0 to CityOWL. ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, X-4/W4-2024, pp. 231-238. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-X-4-W4-2024-231-2024
An OWL rendering of the CityGML 3.0 model as a network of ontologies.
Preuveneers, D., Van den Bergh, J., Wagelaar, D., Georges, A., Rigole, P., Clerckx, T., Berbers, Y., Coninx, K., Jonckers, V., De Bosschere, K. (2004). Towards an extensible context ontology for ambient intelligence. In European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (EUSAI 2004), pp. 148–159. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30473-9_15
An ontology modelling user, platform, environment and service for context-aware applications in pervasive computing.
Context-Driven Adaptation of Mobile Services
Mubashar Iqbal and Raimundas Matulevičius, "Corda Security Ontology: Example of Post-Trade Matching and Confirmation", Baltic Journal of Modern Computing, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 638–674, 2020. DOI: 10.22364/bjmc.2020.8.4.11
A security ontology classifying assets, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures for Corda applications.
Kaloroumakis, P. E. and Smith, M. J. (2021). Toward a Knowledge Graph of Cybersecurity Countermeasures. Technical Report Case 20-2034. The MITRE Corporation, Annapolis Junction, MD. Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited. Available: https://d3fend.mitre.org/resources/D3FEND.pdf (also indexed at DTIC accession AD1156977).
A knowledge graph of cybersecurity countermeasures (defensive techniques).
Detection, Denial & Disruption Framework Empowering Network Defense
Borgo, S., Ferrario, R., Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C., Porello, D., Sanfilippo, E. M., & Vieu, L. (2022). DOLCE: A descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering. Applied Ontology, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-210259
A foundational ontology capturing core cognitive and linguistic categories of common-sense knowledge.
Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering
Presutti, V. & Gangemi, A. (2016). Dolce+D&S Ultralite and its main ontology design patterns. In Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns: Foundations and Applications (Studies on the Semantic Web, vol. 25, pp. 81–103). IOS Press. https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-676-7-81
A lightweight simplification of parts of the DOLCE foundational ontology.
Loebe, F., Burek, P., & Herre, H. (2022). GFO: The General Formal Ontology. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 71–106. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-220264
A general formal (upper-level) ontology of objects, processes, time, space, properties and relations.
Hoehndorf, R., Loebe, F., Poli, R., Herre, H., & Kelso, J. (2008). GFO-Bio: A biological core ontology. Applied Ontology, 3(4), 219–227. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-2008-0055
A biological core ontology grounded in the GFO upper-level ontology.
Kabul Kurniawan, Elmar Kiesling, Dietmar Winkler, Andreas Ekelhart. "The ICS-SEC KG: An Integrated Cybersecurity Resource for Industrial Control Systems." In: The Semantic Web – ISWC 2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 15233, pp. 153–170. Springer, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77847-6_9
The ontology of the SEPSES Industrial Control Systems security knowledge graph, integrating several cyber-security vocabularies.
An ontology representing Industrial Control Systems security advisories.
Industrial Control Systems Advisory ontology
Ian Bailey, John Beverley, Helena Blackmore, Andreas Cola, Paul Cripps, Giacomo de Colle, Federico Donato, Amanda Hicks, David Limbaugh, Elena Milivinti, Chris Partridge, Rebecca Rafferty, Barry Smith. "Comparing Information Exchange Standard and Basic Formal Ontology Design Patterns." In: The Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO) — Episode XI, co-located with FOIS 2025, Catania, Italy, 8–12 September 2025. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 4176.
The UK Government Information Exchange Standard for consistent, interoperable data exchange.
Information Modelling Framework (IMF) — an industry ontology/framework for facility asset modelling. Source: ns.imfid.org / github.com/imf-lab (IMF Manual). No associated peer-reviewed publication was identified.
An ontology for modelling facility assets across the design, construction and operation of industrial facilities.
Georgios Meditskos, Nick Bassiliades, Dimitris Vrakas, and Ioannis Vlahavas. 2012. IRISPortal: a semantic portal for industrial risk cases management. In Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS '12), Article 28, 1–8. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2254129.2254164
A core ontology of terms and relationships for risk identification and assessment.
Costa, D., Albrethsen, M. J., Collins, M. L., Perl, S., Silowash, G., & Spooner, D. (2016). An Insider Threat Indicator Ontology. Technical Report CMU/SEI-2016-TR-007. Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute.
An ontology of insider-threat indicators.
Matheus, C.J. & Ulicny, B. (2007). On the Automatic Generation of an OWL Ontology based on the Joint C3 Information Exchange Data Model. In Proceedings of the 12th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS), Newport, RI, USA.
A data model for the exchange of joint command, control and consultation information (military C2).
Joint Consultation, Command & Control Information Exchange Data Model
Meriah, I., Ben Arfa Rabai, L., & Khedri, R. (2025). Building a comprehensive and multi-dimensional information security ontology: elicitation process and OWL implementation. Knowledge and Information Systems, 67(1), 167–195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-024-02308-y
A multi-dimensional information security ontology that decomposes security into dimensional views.
Multi-dimensional Information Security Ontology
Nokia AND LicenseRef-W3C-Document-License
David Martin (ed.), Mark Burstein, Jerry Hobbs, Ora Lassila, Drew McDermott, Sheila McIlraith, Srini Narayanan, Massimo Paolucci, Bijan Parsia, Terry Payne, Evren Sirin, Naveen Srinivasan, Katia Sycara. OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. W3C Member Submission, 22 November 2004. https://www.w3.org/submissions/2004/SUBM-OWL-S-20041122/
An OWL ontology for describing Semantic Web services, enabling automated discovery, invocation and composition.
Anastasiya Kurylets and Nikolaj Goranin, "Security Ontology OntoSecRPA for Robotic Process Automation Domain," Applied Sciences, vol. 13, no. 9, art. 5568, 2023. DOI: 10.3390/app13095568
A security ontology for Robotic Process Automation: assets, risks, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures.
Security Ontology for Robotic Process Automation
Ops (Operations) Ontology — a community OWL ontology for interoperability between the software-development and operations domains; the upstream project bundles a MITRE ATT&CK module that is not present in the DISO-merged artefact. Source: github.com/CDSRV/ops-ontology. No associated peer-reviewed publication was identified.
A cyber-security ontology focused on the operations domain.
Daniele, L., den Hartog, F., and Roes, J. (2015). Created in Close Interaction with the Industry: The Smart Appliances REFerence (SAREF) Ontology. In: Cuel, R., Young, R. (eds) Formal Ontologies Meet Industry. FOMI 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21545-7_9
A suite of reference ontologies for semantic interoperability across IoT domains.
Matheus, C. J., Kokar, M. M., & Baclawski, K. (2003). A core ontology for situation awareness. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2003), pp. 545–552.
A domain-independent upper ontology for situation awareness.
He, X.; Kuai, X.; Li, X.; Qiu, Z.; He, B.; Guo, R. Smart City Ontology Framework for Urban Data Integration and Application. Smart Cities 2025, 8(5), 165. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities8050165
A hierarchical ontology framework for integrating urban (smart-city) data across domains.
Ontologies describing the SNORT intrusion detection and prevention system, its rules and its alerts.
SNORT Network Intrusion Detection ontologies
Herzog, A., Shahmehri, N., and Duma, C. (2007). An Ontology of Information Security. International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP) 1(4): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.4018/jisp.2007100101
A security ontology modelling assets, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures, with extension ontologies.
Harry Chen, Filip Perich, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi. "SOUPA: Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications." Proceedings of the First Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2004), IEEE, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1109/MOBIQ.2004.1331732
A standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications: agents, time, space, events and policies.
Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications
OASIS Cyber Threat Intelligence Technical Committee. STIX Version 2.1. Edited by Bret Jordan, Rich Piazza, and Trey Darley. OASIS Standard. 10 June 2021. https://docs.oasis-open.org/cti/stix/v2.1/os/stix-v2.1-os.html. (OWL binding: OASIS Threat Actor Context TC, tac-ontology, https://github.com/oasis-tcs/tac-ontology)
An OWL representation of the OASIS STIX 2.1 cyber-threat-intelligence specification.
Structured Threat Information eXpression (2.1)
Kokar, M. M., Matheus, C. J., and Baclawski, K. (2009). Ontology-based situation awareness. Information Fusion, 10(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2007.01.004
An OWL formalisation of situation theory for situation awareness.
GPL-3.0-only AND LicenseRef-IEEE-SUMO-License
Ian Niles and Adam Pease. 'Towards a Standard Upper Ontology.' In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2001), Ogunquit, Maine, USA, October 17–19, 2001. ACM. DOI: 10.1145/505168.505170.
The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology: a large formal upper ontology with linked domain ontologies.
de Franco Rosa, F., Teixeira Junior, L.A.L., Bonacin, R., and Jino, M. (2020). SecAOnto: A Conceptual Model of Security Assessment. International Journal of Web Portals, 12(2), 57–80. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJWP.2020070104
An ontology for security assessment, at the intersection of security and software assessment.
Alirezaie, M., Hammar, K., Blomqvist, E., Nyström, M., and Ivanova, V. (2018). SmartEnv Ontology in E-care@home. In SSN 2018 — 9th Int. Semantic Sensor Networks Workshop (ISWC 2018), vol. 2213, pp. 72–79.
A smart-home environment ontology network (eCare@Home) covering time, geometry, events, sensing, situation and place.
Smart Home Environments Ontology (eCare@Home)
Christian Reinisch, Mario J. Kofler, Félix Iglesias, Wolfgang Kastner. "ThinkHome Energy Efficiency in Future Smart Homes." EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems, vol. 2011, Article ID 104617, 18 pp., 2011. DOI: 10.1155/2011/104617.
A smart-home ontology for home control and energy efficiency.
Casey, E., Barnum, S., Griffith, R., Snyder, J., van Beek, H., and Nelson, A. (2018). The Evolution of Expressing and Exchanging Cyber-investigation Information in a Standardized Form. In: Biasiotti et al. (eds), Handling and Exchanging Electronic Evidence Across Europe. Springer. [Foundational CASE/UCO reference; UCO is a community project, github.com/ucoProject/UCO.]
A community ontology providing a consistent foundation for representing information across the cyber-security domain (UCO Project).
Zareen Syed, Ankur Padia, Tim Finin, Lisa Mathews, and Anupam Joshi. UCO: A Unified Cybersecurity Ontology. AAAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (AICS), February 2016.
A semantic ontology extending STIX with cyber-security standards (Syed et al.).
Unified Cybersecurity Ontology (Syed et al.)
João Paulo A. Almeida, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Tiago Prince Sales, Ricardo A. Falbo. "gUFO: A Lightweight Implementation of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)". Version 1.0.0, 2019. Available: http://purl.org/nemo/doc/gufo. (A 2026 arXiv preprint expanding this work: Almeida et al., "gUFO: A Gentle Foundational Ontology for Semantic Web Knowledge Graphs", arXiv:2603.20948, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.20948)
A lightweight OWL 2 implementation of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).
gUFO: lightweight Unified Foundational Ontology
Poveda-Villalón, M., Suárez-Figueroa, M. C., García-Castro, R., and Gómez-Pérez, A. (2010). A Context Ontology for Mobile Environments. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Context, Information and Ontologies (CIAO 2010), co-located with EKAW 2010, Lisbon, Portugal. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 626. ISSN 1613-0073. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-626/regular3.pdf
An ontology network representing user context for mobile environments: location, environment, services, devices and social information.
mIO! Ontology Network (context for mobile environments)