IGERT

Integrating Information

Alternative titles:

Situational Awareness (unsuitable because of strong military associations)

Scenes, Situations, Environments: New Challenges for Information Integration

Towards the Integrated Information Science of the Future

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, from air traffic adverse event analysis to tracking of biological agents, 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 readily application to a variety of different sorts of problems by the scientists of the future.

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, natural language understanding and other text- and data-mining tools, the spatial reasoning tools of Geographic Information Science, together with the theories of ontology -- creating and disseminating common controlled vocabularies to enable data and information from different disciplines to be integrate in ways which are intelligible and useful to human beings. 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 committed thus far:

Rajan Batta (CMIF)

Werner Ceusters (Center for Bioinformatics)

Maureen Donnelly (Philosophy)

Louis Goldberg (Oral Biology)

Holm (Center for Bioinformatics)

Koepsell Little Mark Perrelli Ramanathan Renschler Smith Yeh Zhang Zubrow

to approach Rohini Srihari Ling Bian Further CMIF people

Berman ?

Tom Bittner ?

Marc Halfon (?)

Howard Lasker (Geology) (?)