Human Terrain Knowledge Base

From Milcord Complex Operations Wiki

The Complex Operations wiki currently contains more than 2,000 articles on the various tribal dynamics and locational knowledge for the Afghanistan and Pakistan region, outlining tribal meta-knowledge such as the sub-groups, primary locations, traditional alliances, and traditional disputes of various groups to support situational awareness about the human terrain.

The wiki section covers:

• Afghanistan Organizational Groups
• District and Province information for situational awareness

Over 150 concept maps (an example shown below) have been created to capture the knowledge about 2,000 ethnic groups, tribes, sub-tribes, clans within Afghanistan and Pakistan region to make this human terrain knowledge readily accessible to the complex operations practitioner.

The use of a semantic wiki platform enables the representation of the human terrain knowledge as facts and relationships. For instance, the wiki page for the Achakzai tribal group lists the known facts and relationships about this ethnic group in both a human consumable form using semantic forms,as well as a machine consumable form as semantic RDF relationships as shown below.

By inspecting the semantic form, the reader can see that Achakzai is a sub-tribe of Zirak, which belongs to the Durrani super-tribe, primarily located in the Chora and Khas Uruzgan districts, and traditionally having disputes with the Nurzai, Panjpai and Kakar tribes. There are also several groups in Afghanistan that do not organize around tribal kinship ties, including Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras. In addition to tribal affiliation, social organizations such as solidarity groups – a group of people that acts as a single unit and organizes on the basis of some shared identity, and patronage networks, led by local warlord or khan – play an important role in understanding of the human terrain. Afghan and Pakistan human terrain and situational awareness knowledge base can be extended to include other populations of interest to the community, such as Yemen or Somalia.

The representation of this knowledge in a semantic wiki has the additional advantage for faceted browsing and answering database and search engine queries. For instance, the semantic wiki can answer questions like “What are the tribes in Kandahar Province and their traditional disputes?” as a table which gets automatically updated every time a new tribe in this province is added to the wiki.