Advanced Software Technologies for Protecting America

need to harness technology to detect threats and protect against and respond to them. Table 1 presents a list of some recent initiatives directly related to homeland security; the applicable enabling advanced software technologies are also listed. In some stand-alone activities such as bomb detection or airline missile protection, no new software technologies are needed. More work in domain-specific algorithms may be required, but fundamental software techniques are adequate for these programs to succeed. Common to many homeland security programs is the need for searching, mining, and analyzing large databases (for example, visa tracking, biometric pattern matching, and analysis of foreign language materials). The fundamentals of these types of database technologies exist and upgrades in technologies are ongoing, particularly in enhancements to speed and accuracy. New needs to integrate communication systems from agencies that formerly did not use common equipment (police, fire, etc.) and the need to fuse information such as weather data and models of chemical/biological agents requires the integration of existing system architectures. Tools and techniques to develop these software-intensive system architectures such as using ontology for information definition/retrieval and using reference architectures are needed for the successful development of these systems.