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 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 .

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 a variety of application domains in the use of such theories and methods in solving practical problems they face in their research. These include the theories of ontology ? creating and disseminating common controlled vocabularies ? and the tools, including GIS tools, of instance-level reasoning. We will foster projects to apply and extend these tools to address new challenges of cross-disciplinary communication in a variety of biospatial domains at a variety of scales, environmental hazards, intelligence analysis, biodefense, epidemiology and public health.

Five Axes 1. Ontologies (Barry Smith)

2. Databases (Aidong Zhang)

3. Referent Tracking (Werner Ceusters)

4. Image / Map Analysis

5. Realtime Sensor Data

6. Natural Language Understanding (Rohini Srihari ?)

Information integration across these disciplines will succeed only if there are common frameworks for representing the types of entities in shared domains, and common mechanisms for identifying and reasoning about specific instances of these types and the relations between them.

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