Information integration for counter terrorism activities: requirements for context mediation

Abstract

The National Research Council has noted that "[Allthough there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counterterrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other databases and the extraction of meaningful and timely information." In this paper we present examples of these problems and a technology developed at MIT, called context mediation, which provides a novel approach for addressing these problems.information3". This report clearly recognized the important problem that the semantic data integration research community has been studying.Context Mediation technology addresses this problem and deals directly with the integration of heterogeneous contexts (i.e. data meaning) in a flexible, scalable and extensible environment. This approach makes it easier and more transparent for receivers (e.g., applications, sensors, users) to exploit distributed sources (e.g., databases, web, 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. information repositories, sensors). Receivers are able to TABLE OF CONTENTSspecify their desired context so that there will be no uncertainty in the interpretation of the information coming from heterogeneous sources. The approach and associated tools significantly reduce the overhead involved in the integration of multiple sources and simplifies maintenance in an environment of changing source and receiver context.