The BattleSpace Luminary System

While the Global Information Grid provides access to multiple data sources, modern warfighters and analysts must determine when new information directly impacts their mission, and what additional meanings they could infer from the new data. The government needs a system that can extract and identify the semantic meaning of new data, append or update this information in a semantic wiki, and provide alerts to warfighters and analysts alike. Team VSTI proposes the Battlefield Luminary System to meet these needs. The system will use formal ontologies to extract information from a variety of data sources, use this information to update a semantically-enabled wiki, create additional media content to enhance understanding through visualization, and then disseminate relevant alerts to analysts and warfighters in the field. In Phase II, the system will extend to include additional reasoning and extraction techniques, and apply other semantic tags such as microformats. The system also offers numerous commercial applications. By applying different ontologies, the military could apply the system to supply chain management. Field medics and physicians could apply the system to patient medical records, and financial analysts could apply the system to monitoring economic indicators.