Ontologies of Terrain Intelligence
Core function: STRUCTURE - Encoding insights from fieldwork into formalized knowledge systems for AI, design, and governance use.
Ongoing
Some knowledge resists spreadsheets. When landscape insights must become actionable, ontologies navigate spatial complexity. Whether you’re designing rehearsal environments, deploying field operations across divergent terrains, or building systems that must interpret place as more than a set of coordinates, this capability helps translate the tacit, embodied knowledge of how we understand environments into a structured intelligence that facilitates decision making and orientation which ultimately means faster adaptation. Ontology makes sure you get the structure perfected before you scale.
Operational Context
In domains where terrain is treated as either obstacle or backdrop, critical patterns go unseen. My ontology-driven approach to terrain intelligence offers a third path: a system for structuring meaning within landscape, turning the physical environment into a legible, sharable framework of cues, affordances, and logic.
I develop operational ontologies: modular systems that encode field-specific logics into usable spatial knowledge. These ontologies function as grammars that help teams interpret, reason, and act through terrain. They align mission objectives with environmental affordances, and allow insight to scale from site-specific deployments to institution-wide knowledge systems.
Structural Intelligence Layer
Ontologies make it possible to externalize cognitive load: they allow teams to see structure where others see noise. Drawing from embodied cognition, linguistic anthropology, and systems modeling, I create taxonomies and grammars that:
Translate spatial or material features into operational categories
Structure memory, decision-making, and planning
Enable transfer across locations, missions, or disciplines
Like all ontologies, they live a double-life: frameworks for thinking, but also tools for aligning teams across operations, improving mission planning, and designing environments that teach.
Wherever terrain impacts mission performance, ontologies serve as connective tissue. I work with:
R&D teams building experimental environments or robotic systems
Governments and institutions managing legacy sites or uncertain futures
Design and architecture teams encoding site logic into form
Exploration and readiness programs who need to scale insight
Ontology systems often precede or accompany spatial deployments. They're also key to continuity in fast-moving environments because they turn ad hoc terrain expertise into institutional memory and transmittable intelligence.
Strategic Application
Types of Deliverables
Operational Ontologies – Tailored frameworks to structure terrain knowledge
Environmental Grammars – Syntax rules for interpreting space, sequence, and structure
Transferable Lexicons – Shared language for distributed or cross-domain teams
DoDAF / TOGAF Models - Compliant models of land resource systems ready for integration
Schema Libraries – Portable libraries of logic patterns and affordances
Terrain Intelligence Diagrams – Strategic visuals for leadership and planning