December 17, 2010 – The U.S. Navy believes the semantic Web will connect data in new ways and lay the foundation for further advances in their world. Their objective is to manage a global network that delivers instant integration of military data across a number of separate specializations such as geographic, intelligence, logistics and manpower, as well as provide information about red or blue forces. The semantic Web will be the engine needed to power the effort.
This interesting article was found on Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) titled, “Navy Prepares to Take An Important First Step.” Currently, the Information Dominance Corps (IDC) depends on human analysts to cross-reference disparate data repositories and reconciling data sources that describe the identical event, but are coded differently. To overcome manpower limitations in the future, the IDC will resort to semantic Web technologies to assemble and correlate data that would support operating needs. Using data ontologies enables the semantic technology to extract meaning from the data in their related context.
The difference between the index and the semantic methods is that data retrieved by index methods must depend on human intervention to extract knowledge from a huge number of possible choices. For semantic extractions, the available data is examined by computers and only by human analysts as needed. With ontologies being used in many technological advances, we should expect to see semantic Web use much more frequently.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
