IGERT
Integrating Information
The preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement will standardly require the integration of information deriving from archeologists, biologists, geologists, GIS technicians, and atmospheric scientists. Such cross-domain and cross-modality information integration is nowadays required as a matter of course in a variety of domains, from public health screening to aeronautical guidance, from oil exploration to meteorological sensor systems, and from enterprise information systems to intelligence analysis. Yet the methods for such information integration are still to a surprising degree ad hoc and fall short of forming a coherent curriculum which can be transmitted and tested and refined in application to a variety of different sorts of problems.
We propose an IGERT 1. to train a future generation of information scientists in the theories and methods of information integration, 2. to train scientists in the use of such theories and methods in a variety of application domains.
The tools we have in mind will include standard database and image analysis tools, the spatial reasoning tools of Geographic Information Science, together with the theories of ontology -- creating and disseminating common controlled vocabularies. We will foster projects to apply and extend these tools to address new challenges of cross-disciplinary communication in a variety of domains at a variety of scales, including environmental hazards (?), intelligence analysis, biodefense, epidemiology and public health .... .
We envision the following
Six Axes
1. Ontologies (Barry Smith)
2. Databases (Aidong Zhang)
3. Referent Tracking (Werner Ceusters)
4. Image / Map Analysis (Thomas Bittner? Murali Ramanathan?)
5. Realtime Sensor Data (Rajan Batta)
6. Natural Language Understanding (Rohini Srihari ?)
Faculty interested thus far:
Batta Berman Bittner Ceusters Donnelly Goldberg Halfon Holm Lasker(?) Koepsell Little Mark Perrelli Ramanathan Renschler Smith Yeh Zhang Zubrow
to approach Rohini Srihari Ling Bian Further CMIF people