Data Standardization and Brokering

"The problem of effecting data standardization and brokering for purposes of infrastructure protection is one that unavoidably involves a wide range of types of domain knowledge, data sources and client types. Furthermore, information requirements may beunpredictable but also require fast and efficient gathering of complete and reliable data. IET contends that this problem is inherently bifurcated. Solutions resulting in robust systems must involve both the implementation of semantically rich metadatastandards and consideration of procedures to reason with imperfect query results. IET will develop a semantically rich metadata standard to use in marking up data sources within the energy sectors and demonstrate how this can result in efficient andaccurate data matching between client needs and source. IET will implement their experience in Bayesian reasoning to offer unique solutions to the semantic interoperability problems by developing methods to reason about knowledge credibility from networkand metadata information as well as extract useable knowledge when query results are imperfect. The result of this research effort will be the design and prototype of a brokering environment and markup language that provides a central medium to leveragesoftware applications and data being managed by various communities supporting critical infrastructure assurance initiatives. There are several organizations within the government in general