It’s been a couple of weeks now since the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, and since then the media and others have been questioning whether there was an intelligence failure at the FBI. It’s not an easy question to answer, given how many suspicious persons and activities government agencies must have on their radars, and all the data there is to deal with.

It’s undeniably hard work. Semantic technology does come into play to help the government connect the dots on information related to threats and other intelligence issues. For example, Dennis Wisnosky, formerly CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, discussed semantic technology’s role in that institution at SemTech in San Francisco in 2011. (Wisnosky now is spending more time with FIBO in his role providing technical strategy and operational guidance to help the The Enterprise Data Management Council finalize and implement Financial Industry Business Ontology standards – see story here.) It’s also been reported that the FBI and CIA are practicing and developing semantic processing techniques to analyse social media to improve situational awareness and identify emerging threats.

Semantic tech is being applied by military intelligence, too, in services like the Air Force and Marine Corp., which are testing or have live deployments of semantic systems developed by Modus Operandi.  The Air Force is involved with analyzing email traffic on a 24/7 basis, while the Marine Corp. works with it as part of the cyber portion war games exercises. The Office of Naval Research also is utilizing it as part of its lab exercises, says Modus Operandi president Rick McNeight.

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A recent article reports that “In its ongoing quest to catalyze cost efficiencies and improve information-sharing, the Defense Department is increasingly looking to IT to solve problems of all sizes. The latest bid involves high-tech search capabilities, interoperable data and a futuristic, data-rich internet known as semantic web.”

It continues, “In a new RFI, the Defense Information Systems Agency and Deputy Chief Management Office are looking to strengthen interoperability and data-sharing for a vast array of requirements through an enterprise information web (EIW). Read more

The US Department of Defense has funded a project called the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) that will “make real data on conflicts and insurgencies available for academic study by scholars from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University as well as from Princeton. According to a Fast Company article by Neal Ungerleider, by making this level of conflict data available the Department of Defense can essentially ‘crowdsource’ research and analysis. Furthermore, the study may one day make vetted data from the project available to the public, opening up even larger opportunities.” Read more

TEKsystems is on the hunt for a Semantic Web Technologist in Arlington, VA, for a contract position: “The Semantic Web Technologist will perform complex analysis and provide advanced technical direction and delivery in the design, incorporation, and implementation of Enterprise Ontology’s and Semantics in the architectures of all Integrated Management Information Environment (IMIE) product offerings and solutions at the domain, enterprise, and federal levels in support of Department of Defense (DoD) initiatives.” Active US security clearance is required for this position. Read more

A new article reports, “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD progenitors of revolutionary tech like passive radar and the Internet, is calling for research applications of social media to strategic communication. According to an agency announcement (PDF), DARPA is looking to shell out $42 million in funding for ‘innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.’ The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.” This push toward the innovative social technology is hardly new territory for DARPA – the agency has been at the forefront of the semantic web for years with initiatives like DAML, the US flagship R&D program in semantic web. Read more

“The Secretary of Defense is responsible for a half-trillion dollar enterprise that is roughly an order of magnitude larger than any commercial corporation that has ever existed. DoD estimates that business support activities—the Defense Agencies and the business support operations within the Military Departments—comprise 53% of the DoD enterprise.”

This was one of the realities put forward by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, during his Keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco. Mr. Wisnosky was speaking about how the US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” In particular, he spoke about using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.
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The web is ablaze with chatter from this week’s Semantic Technology Conference. One article states, “That semantic technologies are no longer purely niche is proven not only by the increasing number of diverse companies present, and by the rich number of case studies that crowd the agenda (pharmaceutical and financial markets for now are the leaders) but also by the fact that the San Francisco event is just one of three editions of the conference this year. The first European edition will be held in London in September, followed by the Washington D.C. event in October, focusing on applications devoted to government organizations.” Read more

— DR. JANS AASMAN, ROBERT STANLEY

Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc., and Robert Stanley, President & CEO of IO Informatics, about the announcement of their new strategic partnership to deliver 'fit for purpose' applications created by an innovative Semantic application framework. Their partnership has already seen success with the Pfizer IDEA pilot, which serves as a real-world example of using a semantic application in the pharma industry. This pilot was used to integrate data for compound purity verification and drug product stability analysis. The IDEA project was originally expected to take four to six months to produce results, but by using the AllegroGraph-Sentient framework, it was completed in only six weeks.

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Much if not all of the discussion over the past two years in regards to Healthcare Modernization has revolved around the deployment of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. Monies were budgeted to EHR adoption in last year’s Stimulus package and more monies will be allocated towards EHR adoption as a result of the recent Healthcare Reform package. So what does this all mean in regards to Intelligent Healthcare and the application of Semantic technology? First we’ll need to take a closer look at EHRs.

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Integration is more than the coding of application or data interfaces. When dealing with complex integration within or across enterprises, there must be sufficient discipline to achieve reproducible results. Furthermore, that discipline must be tailored to the unique requirements of the domain/s in question. Few domains are as complex as Healthcare. Even more important perhaps is that integration cannot be viewed outside of the context of the outcomes within the domains they are meant to serve. Technical success may not translate to process or performance improvement if the relationships between domain goals and enabling technologies aren’t properly understood. Some of the basic concepts associated with our IH include the following:

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