There are learning and performance requirements that are common to some or all of the services (e.g. vehicle maintenance, small arms operation, and mission planning). One barrier to reuse and sharing of knowledge related to these common requirements is the fact that different services, and often different units within a service, use different methods and terminology when collecting data and reporting on the constituent tasks and how they are performed. Knowledge about performance is primarily communicated in documents which do not have a standard format. Given that standardizing the whole of the DOD on one methodology is not an attainable goal in the immediate future, workarounds are required in order to prevent costly duplication of performance analysis work.

We will present a comparative analysis of three methodologies for performance analysis from the Navy, the Coast Guard, and a generic model. The analysis of these methodologies will illustrate that even though there are commonalities, they are obscured by differences in terminology. This comparison forms the basis of a simple knowledge ontology for the domain of military performance analysis.

The resulting domain ontology is used to test the feasibility of the automated translation of digitized data among different methodologies and formats. This is achieved by linking customized web interfaces to a common digital repository which uses the domain ontology to translate among different methodologies of performance analysis. Such a system, if implemented on a large scale, would assist in alerting analysts to relevant data from prior projects. It would facilitate the rapid evaluation and assimilation of such data by presenting it in a format and with terminology familiar to the end user.