Artifact Metaphors: Gaining Capability Using "Wrong" Tools

In everyday life as well as in the asymmetric warfare domain, to achieve the intended goals, agents often don't exploit the designed and purpose-built tools but some other tools whose features simply fit for the purpose. Starting from the well established ideas carried out to build ontologies of functional concepts of artifacts, we propose to extend such ontologies with explicit recordings of physical features. A mechanism of similarity mapping between ontology classes, using feature-based similarity measures, will drive the research and retrieval of artifacts which are possible substitute for the proper tool.