Twitter, Facebook and Ten Red Balloons: Social Network Problem Solving and Homeland Security
The winner of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) Essay Contest in 2010, this essay looks at how homeland security could benefit from crowd-sourced applications accessed through social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Christopher M. Ford looks at the apparent efficacy of two such endeavors: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) competition to find ten 8-foot balloons moored across the continental U.S. and Wired Magazine challenge to “find” author Evan Ratliff. Based on these and other crowd-sourced applications, Ford suggests that the U.S. government could utilize the internet and social networking sites to potentially solve an array of discrete problems through the active participation of interested citizens.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Agent Markup Language Computer Aided Knowledge Acquisition
Abstract : Dynamics Research Corporation (DRC) supported DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) research by investigating potential military applications for Semantic Web technology. DRC developed a variety of ontologies to demonstrate the application of DAML technology and to identify challenges to military-specific applications. DRC's experience with ontology development and maintenance led to the development of ontology configuration management and versioning processes. Initial research under this contract has influenced the adoption of DAML by the Air Force's Air Mobility Command (AMC) Integrated Flight Management Advanced Technology Demonstration (IFM/ATD) Foreign Clearance Guide effort and the Joint Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstration (ACTD) program. DAML technology continues to evolve and promises to provide benefits for military applications.
Potential modeling and simulation applications of the Web ontology language - OWL
The semantic Web is an evolution of the current world-wide web that provides explicit semantics that enable software applications to better process information representations. The Web ontology language - OWL - is a new language for representing information on the semantic Web. Modeling and simulation (M&S) applications have many information representation challenges. Examples of M&S data include data tables from authoritative data sources, behaviors for computer generated forces, and descriptions of units and entities to be simulated. OWL provides a consistent syntax using the resource description framework (RDF) and predefined constructs with standard semantics. These features enable better information sharing and support reasoning by inferencing systems. OWL is best used for representing object-oriented descriptions of items in a well-defined domain. It could be used in the M&S community to support distributed representations of data, behaviors, descriptions of units and objects to be simulated, and scenarios with initial conditions.