Semantic Technologies and Publish/Subscribe in Support of Distributed Decision Making

Semantic technologies are a family of specifications and accompanying tools that aim to raise the level of data processing from the syntactic to the semantic. The research community expects this to bring important advantages to information integration and sharing, culminating with the realisation of a semantic web. Publish/subscribe is a paradigm for asynchronous exchange of messages between anonymous and loosely coupled clients. The routing of messages is based on the expressed information need of the receiving clients. This thesis outlines the design and properties of a publish/subscribe notification service that uses semantic technologies for selective filtering and routing of notifications. In addition, it discusses how the proposed solution might be applied to a specific domain. Network Centric Warfare (NCW) is chosen for application domain. NCW is a military doctrine with the ambition of using information technology to reform the way military forces are organised and operate