Metadata Databases

Technology to aid in the understanding of intelligence data has not kept pace with the technology used to generate and store the data. This imbalance has led to a situation where the time required for an analyst to understand the content of a data set and mine the relevant information far exceeds the time available to the mission they support. The root of the problem is a mismatch between the meaning-based information needs of the Warfighter and the context and meaning insensitive nature of the current generation of analysis tools. The CONtext-Aware Representation of Knowledge (CON-ARK) system builds a context-aware, meaning-based representation of the intelligence data and uses a variety of algorithms to provide an interactive view into the semantic representation and to automate discovery and summarization of the data. A meaning-aware search capability provides a semantic view into the corpus, providing a game-changing information extraction capability. This capability goes far beyond simply discarding irrelevant uses of words and phrases that match a user’s search terms. DAC’s concept search tool will identify data whose meaning is relevant to the Warfighter’s interest no matter what language is used to express the ideas.