A Bayesian Blackboard for Information Fusion

A Bayesian blackboard is just a conventional, knowledge-based blackboard system in which knowledge sources modify Bayesian networks on the blackboard. As an architecture for intelligence analysis and data fusion this has many advantages: The blackboard is a shared workspace or “corporate memory” for collaborating analysts; analyses can be developed over long periods of time with information that arrives in dribs and drabs; the computers contribution to analysis can range from data-driven statistical algorithms up to domain-specific, knowledge-based inference; and perhaps most important, the control of intelligence-gathering in the world and inference on the blackboard can be rational, that is, grounded in probability and utility theory. Our Bayesian blackboard architecture, called AIID, serves both as a prototype system for intelligence analysis and as a laboratory for testing mathematical models of the economics of intelligence analysis.