Defense and security analysts are drowning in a flood of data: sensors and reporting systems are generating unprecedented amounts, and modern processing capabilities are able to transform and translate that data at an ever-increasing rates. Tomorrow’s defense and security analysts must be able to locate, corroborate, and interpret actionable information in this growing data flood.

Key to achieving this goal is the ability to collaborate.  Evolving and emerging information technology and advances in communications capabilities make collaboration in near real time, and at continental distances, a reality today. Developments in ontology modeling and computer visualization techniques are giving analysts a deeper understanding of data, allowing analysts to rapidly assess large amounts of data and communicate observations, hypotheses, and findings in a collaborative environment.

KBSI designed and demonstrated a semantic framework that supports information discovery, sense making, and presentation in a dynamic, collaborative environment.  In the first phase of the Collaborative Analysis and Knowledge Exploration (CAKE) initiative, KBSI established the requirements for collaborative sense making, formulating techniques for fusing tagged text and image data, and designing a method for collaborative sense making with enhanced situational awareness.  The goal of the CAKE initiative was to establish enabling technology for semantic knowledge creation from multi-modal text and image data feeds through the use of semantic tagging and collaborative visual approaches.

The CAKE innovations include (i) an intelligent, ontology-driven approach for automated semantic tagging of text data; (ii) a new ontology-driven method for fusing information from text, image, and geospatial data; (iii) advanced semantic search and discovery from large, multi-source tagged data collections; and (iv) new methods for interactive visualization that support collaborative sense making and improve situational awareness.

While the CAKE solution provides a number of benefits, chief among these is the reduction in ‘data-to-decision’ time that comes from the use of semantic and collaborative visual analytics techniques.  The CAKE technology also improves the quality of shared situational awareness through the fusion of information from multiple sources and uses ontology-driven semantic methods to help users better exploit the information and knowledge embedded within the data.