Multi-level fusion of hard and soft information

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Driven by the underlying need for a yet to be developed framework for fusing heterogeneous data and information at different semantic levels coming from both sensory and human sources, we present some results of the research being conducted within the NATO Research Task Group IST-106/RTG-051 on "Information Filtering and Multi Source Information Fusion". As part of this on-going effort, we discuss here a first outcome of our investigation on multi-level fusion. It deals with removing the first hurdle between data/information sources and processes being at different levels: representation. Our contention here is that a common representation and description framework is the premise for enabling processing overarching different semantic levels. To this end we discuss here the use of the Battle Management Language (BML) as a way ("lingua franca") to encode sensory data, a priori and contextual knowledge, both as hard and soft data.Publicad

Building a "living database" for human-machine intelligence analysis

In modern military operations the emphasis is on smaller teams and more ad hoc teamwork. This requires greater agility both in terms of capturing actionable intelligence as well as appropriate dissemination and fusion of that information to coalition team members based on their tasks and need to know. In previous research and development we have explored the potential for a controlled natural language (CNL), acting as the sole knowledge representation language to facilitate cooperative working among human and machine agents. In this paper we envision a “living database” to support situation understanding, enable intelligence reporting, fusion and dissemination based on context. The human and machine users of the system have the ability to add, remove, or edit existing information using the CNL, including extensions to the model (or schema) in real-time. In this paper we describe various examples undertaken using this approach along with initial experiments using a conversational software agent to enable the field user to interact with such information in full natural English language

Multi-level fusion of hard and soft information for intelligence

Driven by the underlying need for an as yet undeveloped framework for fusing heterogeneous data and information at different semantic levels coming from both sensory and human sources, we present some results of the research conducted within the NATO Research Task Group IST-106/RTG-051 on “Information Filtering and Multi Source Information Fusion.” As part of this ongoing effort, we discuss here a first outcome of our investigation on multi-level fusion. It deals with removing the first hurdle between data/information sources and processes being at different levels: representation. Our contention here is that a common representation and description framework is the premise for enabling processing overarching different semantic levels. To this end, we discuss here the use of the Battle Management Language (BML) as a way (“lingua franca”) to encode sensor- and text-based data and a priori and contextual knowledge, both as hard and soft data. We here expand on our previous works [1, 2] further detailing and exemplifying the use of BML and clarifying aspects related to the use of contextual information and the exploitation of uncertain soft input along with sensor readings