AIMS: Agent-based Information Management System

The determination of information provenance in order to establish trust about sources of information and its subsequent quality is an important aspect of information management. The volume of digital information and the scale of its growth, both in terms of proliferation of sources as well as the size of digital information, presents a myriad of problems in their management. Validity and quality assessment of information allow the participants in information systems to associate confidence levels with the operations that utilize or are influenced by the information. The AIMS project will develop enabling technologies for managing and exploiting provenance to facilitate the information source trust and quality assessment of information in the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) at minimal cost as well as complete provenance at corresponding processing and time-related costs. We propose the novel concept of information chromosomes that associates approximate provenance in specific bits associated with the information. Provenance maintenance and look-up services are provided by corresponding agents in a network-centric architecture. We will also develop evaluation metrics for in-depth analysis of effectiveness and efficiency of provenance obtained through the AIMS architecture.