A Bayesian Blackboard for Information Fusion

Abstract : 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 computer's 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. The Bayesian blackboard architecture presented here, 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.

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