STIDS – Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security

We’re pleased to share that Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc., will be speaking at STIDS 2026 — Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security, taking place May 27–28, 2026 at George Mason University’s Fuse at Mason Square in Arlington, Virginia.

STIDS brings together leaders from academia, government, and industry to explore the role of semantic technologies in intelligence, defense, and security. This year’s program highlights a timely theme: integrating AI with semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, and data fabrics to support trustworthy and explainable reasoning across complex data ecosystems.

Jans’ joint presentation with Dave McComb and Ryan Hohimer – “Semantic Interoperability in Cybersecurity: Harmonizing Threat Intelligence with gist and gistCyber” Cybersecurity data is fragmented across organizations, standards, and formats, making semantic interoperability a critical challenge.

This paper presents gistCyber, an ontology that extends the minimalist enterprise framework gist into the cybersecurity domain. By harmonizing reference datasets such as MITRE ATT&CK, CAPEC, CVE, and NIST SP 800-53, gistCyber enables unified reasoning, federated querying, and scalable threat analysis. We demonstrate its utility through a practical use case involving SPARQL-based integration of vulnerabilities, weaknesses, attack patterns, and controls. The results show that semantic alignment is not only feasible but essential for intelligent cyber defense.