An RDF Prototype System for Federation and Semantic Alignment of Disparate Counter-Terrorism Information Sources

Understanding terrorist actors and their relationships is critical to being able to discern and reveal terrorist group structure. Different organizations have different sources and data repositories. Each repository contains potentially new information on a particular terrorist group. The ability to perform analysis across these repositories is one of the significant promises of the Semantic Web. Through multiple efforts within the Intelligence Community (IC), these promises are beginning to be realized. However, questions remain as to whether the Semantic Web will enable, at scale, new capabilities in combining disparate information for analysis. Through work for a government customer, SAIC/ASC is developing a prototype using Semantic Web technologies (RDF & OWL). It enables analytical tools to find new information by operating on a federated view. The work is resulting in a cognizance of the balance of logical expressiveness and the performance of current reasoning technologies with the potential for new insights by combining information. The paper presents this work and its application on a live experimental network. It discusses the application of * Supported by Air Force Rome Labs (AFRL) Contract # MDA972-03-9-0001 Semantic Web technologies and the new capabilities enabled. Finally, it provides an understanding of observed technical strengths and weaknesses as applied to counter-terrorism analysis.