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 intelligence analysis.

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 the 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.

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