Robert Sichler
Program Manager
BBN Technologies

Tuesday 2:15pm - 3:15pm

Level: Data Management - Advanced

Research, design, and implementation of an ontology-driven analysis environment and a Spatiotemporal Semantic Knowledge Base has resulted in a new paradigm for imagery analysis. In this environment, observations are recorded as structured annotations using descriptive semantic concepts. The imagery is annotated using terms defined in ontologies. The ontology terms represent the concepts and relationships necessary to effectively describe the objects and activities within a domain of interest, such as air defense. Annotating imagery with ontologies enables powerful querying and exploitation of the analysis results; this can be utilized by intelligence consumers both within and outside of the organization. The Spatiotemporal Semantic Knowledge Base is the repository for all data in the system, including data created by the analyst as well as inferred knowledge from the ontology. This revolutionary system allows creating imagery annotations within a specialized semantic knowledge base capable of efficiently querying the information using semantic, spatial, and temporal qualifiers. The result is analysis knowledge that is much more easily shared than with any current technology.