System Self - Awareness and Related Methods for Improving the Use and Understanding of Data within DoD

Data sources for Department of Defense (DoD) applications often include disparate real-time sensor and archival sources with multiple dimensions, very high delivery rates, and very large volumes over time. Analysts, at present, must manually comb through immense volumes of multisource, multiclassification-level intelligence data to find previously unknown and undiscovered patterns, associations, relationships, trends, and anomalies. In this article, the authors explain how their research and methodology can be applied to a set of data, leveraging automatic and intelligent tools to facilitate the decision maker’s understanding of voluminous, dynamic data and to recognize hidden yet critical links and patterns derived from dynamic, ongoing DoD data. Their efforts could facilitate real-time awareness, reduce the workload of decision makers, and make a profound impact on the long-term success of DoD knowledge management. While their focus remains on DoD sources, this methodology can be applied to any data source.