Development of Distributed, Intelligent Information Management System and Developmental Tools

This research will develop (1) a scalable, secure, open-system architecture for distributed information integration and intelligent information management; (2) an integrated Navy shipboard information management system (INSIMS) that combines the existing Navy information systems; and (3) a set of development tools and an environment for integrating distributed, heterogeneous systems. In this work, we will use commercial-off-the-shelf software and adopt Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to achieve secure interconnectivity among heterogeneous systems, and use a set of information technologies to achieve secure interoperability at semantics level among these systems. We first consider an information system as an information/service requester as well as an information/service provider. We the model information/service requesters and providers with a domain model, which will be developed using ontology technology, and connect the activities of the requesters and providers using wrapper middleware technology. Finally, we employ planning and related methods to coordinate the activities to achieve a common goal. The INSIMS will be able to carry out higher level and larger scale Navy missions and applications. It will also provide a user-centered unified information access interface to the individual and integrated information systems.