Friday, November 19, 2004

FYI:

http://news.com.com/Straight+talking+on+terrorism/2008-1082-5455084.html

Ken Ewell (www.Readware.com ) forwarded to me this recent discussion on cyber security and the general issue of how one makes responses during times of crisis. He and I are talking about the types of ontologies needed in a system for monitoring and response, such as cyber systems, monitoring ports, Highways, critical infrastructure.

Richard Ballard's (www.knowledgefoundations.com) declarative semantic knowledge tools will certainly help develop some of the declarative ontology that are needed. A compare and contrast to Cyc Corp ontology is perhaps useful, as is a compare and contrast with Hendler / Berners Lee's Semantic Web.

In a recent note I suggested that six ontologies were needed in a container monitoring ontology system:

Three Types of Ontology for Crisis Management

Physical infrastructure

1) physical resources related to and used by processes that monitor, or that will monitor, shipping containers.

2) physical resources related to and used by processes that make responses to crisis involving the material contents in, or likely to be in, shipping containers.

Real time conceptual mapping

3) the real time human information traffic arising from normal operation of monitoring and response mechanisms

4) the real time human information traffic arising from operation of monitoring and response mechanisms during critical incident response.

Work-flow or process mapping

5) repository of normal shipping behaviors

6) repository of monitoring and response behaviors

Each of these three types of ontology have two independent ontologies, one for normal operations and one for crisis operations.

This suggestion was directed to the ontology community, in particular Ralph Hodgson at (www.topquadrant.com ) as a starting point for a discussion.

The discussion might take as a background the excellent new books:

· Semantics in Business Systems, by Dave McComb (excellent and non academic)

· Data Mining and uncertain reasoning, by Zhenguin Chen (academic but well written and accessable)

· and

· XML Topic Maps (Jack Park Ed ) (several of the chapters are good, but several others are pretty worthless)

The discussion has to do with the next round of funded instruments that are directing the large contractors to develop DHS system with Semantic Web ontology.

I estimate that no more that 300 individuals in the States would seriously claim to know what to do in a positive and constructive response to this next round.

Five or six would recommend that all of the funding go to them and they will take care of (their) business. I would put into this small class some who would only spend more money without actually creating a new capability. I would also suggest that there are two or three who would create a new capability, and that in each of these cases, this new capability would support the notion of a National Project.

Out of those who claim to know, less that 100 might actually be able to fully engage the problems related to DHS needs, as opposed to private business needs that tens of thousands are well equipped to deal with.

Out of these there are a few who might be willing to move to Washington DC or who are in DC.

Perhaps we only need a proper team of 10 - 15.

The first step is for me, or someone I know, to hire two junior people with some RDF or OWL experience. Others with document management, content management, workflow, and enterprise architecture programming (J2EE) are also being sought.