Improving Homeland Security Coordination through an Integrated and Adaptive Search and Discovery Portal

We propose an innovative technology concept that will greatly improve the ability of DoD and non-DoD Homeland Security (HLS) organizations to coordinate their responses to terrorism events. In Phase I we cultivated relationships with three Washington State emergency management organizations that played key roles in the recent TOPOFF 2 exercise. Drawing on their collective experience we have developed an approach that will help satisfy their need for context-relevant and timely access to information generated by dozens of cooperating agencies. Our solution makes feasible the development, alignment, and maintenance of emergency management command and control ontologies that will be necessary to achieve effective system interoperability. The "hybrid" approach we will adopt will allow each involved organization to maintain their existing information management processes and tools, while offering interoperability through a mediating ontology. Further, the proposed system, Vista, will employ an adaptive machine learning paradigm that will leverage the same parsing/information extraction processes used to enable User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) functionality to support context-sensitive information access and continual ontology refinement. In this Phase II we will build on the strong foundation established in Phase I to construct and evaluate an operational HLS search and discovery portal and proceed toward successful commercialization.