Knowledge that compounds.

Mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions rotate their staffs every two to three years. With each rota­tion goes a sub­stan­tial share of what the insti­tu­tion knew: its con­text, its rela­tion­ships, and judg­ment earned the hard way. Suc­ces­sor teams recon­struct much of it from first prin­ci­ples, and the cycle repeats.

Suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of soft­ware have not solved the prob­lem. They have made it faster to pro­duce work; they have not made it easier to keep.

• A false choice between builders and practitioners

  The present market obliges people to choose. One may become a tech­ni­cal builder, at an increas­ing dis­tance from how the work is actu­ally done, or remain a process spe­cial­ist with­out the means to encode that knowl­edge. Because the two com­pe­tences seldom reside in the same person, the knowl­edge and the system seldom reside in the same place.

• Disposable artifacts

  Head­quar­ters still run largely on doc­u­ments, slides, and spread­sheets. Even where modern plat­forms are adopted, the tools one offi­cer builds are often unin­tel­li­gi­ble to the next, who reverts to a fresh slide deck or begins again on a new system. Effort is spent; little accu­mu­lates.

• No basis for longitudinal assessment

  Where noth­ing accu­mu­lates, there is no con­tin­u­ous record of how deci­sions were reached. With­out one, an orga­ni­za­tion cannot deter­mine whether it is improv­ing or declin­ing. The cog­ni­tive work was never encoded in its sys­tems; it was held in people, and people move on.

• Wisdom and energy without a common medium

  The senior prac­ti­tioner with decades of expe­ri­ence can trans­mit judg­ment only as guid­ance, and guid­ance degrades as it is seri­al­ized, sum­ma­rized, and relayed, until intent becomes inco­her­ent. The new­comer brings energy and cur­rent skills but little con­text. In the pre­vail­ing envi­ron­ment the two work in dif­fer­ent media and talk past one another. Derived Logic offers them a shared medium: expe­ri­ence encoded as struc­ture rather than deliv­ered as instruc­tion, and inher­ited directly by those who follow.

What Derived Logic pro­vides is not another inter­face. It is the ontol­ogy beneath: a living, formal model of how an orga­ni­za­tion’s people, pro­cesses, data, and deci­sions relate to one another.

Users con­struct it simply by doing their work: link­ing a task to the require­ment it serves, a deci­sion to its ratio­nale, a prod­uct to those who rely upon it. No ded­i­cated knowl­edge engi­neers are required, and there is no sep­a­rate data project.

People linktheir everyday work

The system deriveslogic from those links

The next personbegins further ahead

and contributes more, more readily

Every­one draws upon the same under­ly­ing model, yet each person sees only the por­tion that role, clear­ance, and need-to-know permit. Releasabil­ity and clas­si­fi­ca­tion are prop­er­ties of the struc­ture itself, enforced as the work is done rather than policed after the fact.

An interface can be copied. An ontology built by an organization’s own people, which compounds with use, cannot.

Many plat­forms offer to encode an orga­ni­za­tion’s busi­ness pro­cesses in soft­ware. The offer assumes that the pro­cesses are sound. A good number per­sist only because they always have, and to dig­i­tize them faith­fully is to make their short­com­ings per­ma­nent, and faster.

Because knowl­edge com­pounds within Derived Logic, the system can do more than pre­serve a process: it can inter­ro­gate it and pro­pose better ones, employ­ing two modes of rea­son­ing in com­bi­na­tion.

Your laws, your instructions, your caveats

The guardrails belong to the cus­tomer. Derived Logic fol­lows the laws, direc­tives, and national caveats of the orga­ni­za­tion that employs it; it does not set itself above them as an arbiter, nor does it sub­sti­tute its judg­ment for the com­man­der’s. Noth­ing crosses a legal or clas­si­fi­ca­tion bound­ary unac­counted for.

Decisions judged by what was known

Each deci­sion is pre­served together with the data and rules in force when it was taken. It may there­fore be assessed by the stan­dard of its own time, on the basis of what was then known, and sep­a­rately from how events unfolded. This is the dif­fer­ence between learn­ing from the past and judg­ing it with hind­sight.

Each nation oper­ates its own instance, in which its laws, caveats, and pro­ce­dures are encoded. Instances can map their ontolo­gies to one another, so that part­ners under­stand how each other works with­out any data leav­ing national con­trol.

Nation A

Processes and caveats

Data remains here

mapped structure

Nation B

Processes and caveats

Data remains here

Each nation deter­mines pre­cisely what it shares, down to an indi­vid­ual table of process or caveats. A part­ner that holds another’s rule­book knows, during plan­ning and exe­cu­tion alike, how that ally will oper­ate, rather than dis­cov­er­ing a caveat in the middle of an oper­a­tion.

Coali­tion inter­op­er­abil­ity is among the most dif­fi­cult and costly prob­lems in modern war­fare, and it most often founders on the demand to share data. This approach makes no such demand. Allies can act as a single force with­out sur­ren­der­ing either their data or their sovereignty.

Many languages, one structure

Coali­tions work across lan­guages. Con­cepts in the ontol­ogy are anchored to open, mul­ti­lin­gual ref­er­ence vocab­u­lar­ies, and every cor­re­spon­dence is typed (exact, close, broader, or nar­rower), attrib­uted, and dated. Part­ners can there­fore estab­lish, at any later point, what a term means in another nation’s usage and why a given map­ping was made.

Our work is grounded in prac­ti­tion­ers’ expe­ri­ence of cam­paign and oper­a­tional plan­ning in multi­na­tional head­quar­ters, and in a thesis on com­pound­ing knowl­edge.

Derived Logic is an Amer­i­can com­pany. It is designed from the outset for use by allied and part­ner nations, with whom we are in dia­logue about their require­ments. National sovereignty, national law, and national caveats are premises of the design, not later adap­ta­tions.