Collaboration is a hallmark of efficient, large-scale enterprises—collaboration at the basic level, among offices and employees and, equally important, collaboration among the systems of computer technologies that share enterprise data and information. Like employees, these technologies must communicate and must be able to grow and adapt with the developing needs of the enterprise. Enterprises like the Air Force and Department of Defense, who use large and complex computer systems to network an array of technologies—systems and technologies that are perpetually undergoing development—have a particular need for level of collaboration. KBSI's Adaptive Toolkit for Pattern Discovery (ATPD) initiative, funded by the U.S. Air Force, developed technology that helps the DoD more effectively share knowledge and information among their elaborate computer systems.

KBSI's Adaptive Toolkit for Pattern Discovery (ATPD) uses an innovative, hybrid approach to automating the discovery of system-of-systems data utilization patterns in structured and unstructured text sources (e.g., *.txt, *.doc, *.rtf, *.pdf, and *.html). ATPD focuses on extracting the semantic information that inheres in these text sources and how they're utilized. In other words, ATPD uncovers the ontologies that define how data is shared and uses these ontologies to dynamically update the reference knowledge models and repositories used for developing, integrating, and extending the enterprise's applications.

The ATPD capability of developing and refining knowledge repositories compliments the Air Force's Knowledge Management Framework (KMF) architecture that is recognized as an effective knowledge-based integration framework (by Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, for example). KMF has been successful in deploying and sustaining advanced Air Force applications through the use of common domain ontologies to share data. The ATPD technology provides mechanisms for extracting the ontologies and metadata used in developing enterprise knowledge repositories, and also provides the means for visualizing, analyzing, and managing these elements.

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ATPD Concept of Operation

The ATPD functionality is helping to significantly reduce the time and effort needed for extracting and harmonizing knowledge from distributed, unstructured and structured data sources and the time and effort needed to enable knowledge sharing, communication, and semantic integration. The technology not only enhances the Air Force’s large-scale enterprise and system-of-systems application environments development, but can also benefit efforts, federal or commercial, involving emergency response management and requirements compliance management.

The ATPD technologies have a number of potential uses and can benefit any distributed organization engaged in advanced knowledge management, collaborative planning and scheduling, supply chain management, and business intelligence.