Thursday, November 24, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Paul... I know from my time in the Navy that it is hard to be away from family at the holidays, but I want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving and congratulate you on the sale of your dad's paintings as you comment upon in another email. You are in our thoughts here as always...
I am watching this thread with keen interest. My work on cyber conflict is taking me back to the work on cyber attack mechanics in one very important area: cyber attack attribution. I am absolutely convinced that current attack attribution methods either don't go far enough (as in intelligence-based attribution) or fail utterly (technical attribution). Your actionable intelligence model is, I believe, the real path to solving this extremely difficult problem. I think that some of the discussion here may make a significant contribution as well. We will see.
You nibbled around the edges of the solution with the Customs stuff which I collected as you published privately and am using as foundational background for my understanding. Sad that you could not continue that - it probably would have resulted in a major breakthrough in handling massive amounts of complex data.
Additionally, I am working on a generalized knowledge fusion engine, again based upon your foundational work, which reduces massive amounts of data to actionable intelligence. I will be working with Nathan in 2006 to reduce solutions to both problems problem to proofs of concept.
We are beginning to see small amounts of funding trickle in and I believe that, although it is catch-as-catch-can, I will keep Nathan employed for the foreseeable future. He completely enjoys the work we are doing, especially the FARES work which has occupied most of his time thus far. And, of course, Norwich is sill talking about a scholarship for him in the fall.
Interestingly, I have a student exactly his age and with many of his skills and interests who has been working with him (being mentored by him a bit, I think) and that may lead to some interesting tangible output.
Again, Debbie's and my best to you for the holidays, and keep pushing, no matter what others say. This is important work, and in many ways you are its father.
Peter