Multivariant Information Management and Exploitation - Scenario Specification

This report provides a piloting scenario for MIMEX development which involves UK military operations in the Helmand province, Afghanistan. The scenario aims to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities for information exploitation in support of stabilising efforts un-dertaken in a complex environment where there is a blur borderline separating enemy forces and civil elements. The scenario describes the situation in Helmand and UK military tasks planned to be carried out in the province for the following 6 months. Aiming at providing sustainable security for the region, the tasks range from ensuring the safety for the local populations to suppressing insurgent activities. All these are information intensive tasks and draws attention to the challenges with respect to effective information acquisition, management and exploitation. Against this scenario, the report analyses the information requirements for the scenario tasks, which encompass both military and civil information. Based on these, it provides a taxonomy of the required information to serve as the departure point for later ontology development work and identifies relevant information resources currently available in the public domain. These resources are potential information sources for MIMEX’s later information acquisition work. In addition to the above, the report also outlines a set of capabilities anticipated to be imple-mented in support of the following areas in the context of the scenario: knowledge base main-tenance, knowledge monitoring (for situation awareness), situation assessment and analysis, and operational planning. These capabilities are presented as a vision of the technologies that MIMEX will develop and to showcase a wide range of benefits that advance knowledge management and processing can bring to military users. Finally, the report identifies and reviews a number of existing semantic technologies that are relevant to the development of MIMEX.