Semantic Knowledge-based Decision Support

The US Air Force 45th Space Wing is a prime example of a multi-faceted organization responsible for rapidly making complex and critical decisions on a regular basis. Despite substantial documentation and training, decision-makers sometimes lack timely access to some key information. Furthermore, they sometimes lack the knowledge of how and where to get that missing information. Interdependences across multiple physical facilities, administrative organizations, and infrastructure systems are not clearly understood – until the unfortunate consequences of those interdependencies become all too clear. We propose to develop a decision support system that 1) enables decision makers to pose diverse questions about their tasks and environment, 2) provides answers (using multiple modalities) and explanations permitting the decision makers to fully understand the system's underlying data and reasoning, and 3) offers proactive guidance by suggesting additional questions and providing relevant and timely information relevant to the decision maker's context. To achieve these objectives, Cycorp will team with Modus Operandi and build on their KMF work providing semantic access to Space Wing data, as well as with Stottler Henke and their scheduling/planning expert systems. Together, we propose to have an operational prototype question answering system for Space Wing decision makers by the completion of Phase II.