Data Integrity and Consistency through a Formal Logical Integrity Constraints Toolset (DICONFLICT)

The Army has invested heavily in systems such as DCGS-A that provide intelligence analysts with a wealth of information originating from a wide variety of sources and sensors. As the number of sources and sensors grows, however, so does the potential for inconsistent information. We propose to develop a toolset to detect and repair inconsistencies in formal logical representations of intelligence information. Description Logic, as specified in the World Wide Web Consortium"s OWL2 DL standard, is proposed as the formal logic framework, due to its theoretical, computational, and standards properties. The soon-to-be submitted OWL2 Integrity Constraints standard, and an existing implementation of that standard, is proposed as the basis for an integrity constraints mechanism. Innovative techniques are proposed to provide flexibility and scalability when enforcing integrity constraints. Evaluating consistency checking and repair in a large data set is problematic; an extremely rigorous yet inexpensive evaluation procedure is proposed. Combining mathematically rigorous OWL2 DL reasoning with innovative techniques for flexible and scalable integrity constraints, we offer both a solid theoretical basis for future work and a practical solution to achieving data integrity in vast amounts of intelligence data.