Collaborative Sense Making

Analytical tasks at the all-source level, and above, generally require access to intelligence distributed among a variety of forms: structured databases with differing schemas, electronic maps with various metadata schemes, and textual reports in multiple languages. Knowledge bases that employ highly expressive formal languages, such as extensions of first order logic, offer a solution to the challenge of combining information from the current daunting variety of data forms. Such knowledge bases can, in principle, represent the content of all structured sources within a single structure. Such a structure can in turn be accessed by interfaces that allow information to be formed in a way that is natural to analysts - rather than in the various idiosyncratic forms of multiple structured sources. Moreover, the expressive power of such knowledge bases makes it possible for them to integrate existing structured sources as a virtual part of their content, by translating data in those sources. A complete Virtual Knowledge Base (VKB) of data for intelligence analysis would address the need for data to exist in a form that is intelligible to analysts, while circumventing the impracticality of constructing a single knowledge base in which all intelligence data actually resides.