Design of a temporal geosocial semantic web for military stabilization and reconstruction operations

The United States and its Allied Forces have had tremendous success in combat operations. This includes combat in Germany, Japan and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. However not all of our stabilization and reconstruction operations (SARO) have been as successful. Recently several studies have been carried out on SARO by National Defense University as well as for the Army Science and Technology. One of the major conclusions is that we need to plan for SARO while we are planning for combat. That is, we cannot start planning for SARO after the enemy regime has fallen. In addition, the studies have shown that security, power and jobs are key ingredients for success during SARO. It is important to give positions to some of the power players from the fallen regime provided they are trustworthy. It is critical that investments are made to stimulate the local economies. The studies have also analyzed the various technologies that are needed for successfully carrying out SARO which includes sensors, robotics and information management. In this project we will focus on the information management component for SARO. As stated in the work by the Naval Postgraduate School, we need to determine the social, political and economic relationships between the local communities as well as determine who the important people are. This work has also identified the 5Ws (Who, When, What, Where and Why) and the (H). To address the key technical challenges for SARO, we are defining a Life cycle for SARO and subsequently developing a Temporal Geosocial Service Oriented Architecture System (TGSSOA) that utilizes Temporal Geosocial Semantic Web (TGS-SW) technologies for managing this lifecycle. We are developing techniques for representing temporal geosocial information and relationships, integrating such information and relationships, querying such information and relationships and finally reasoning about such information and relationships so that the commander can answer questions related to the 5Ws and H. To our knowledge we believe that this is the first attempt to develop TGS-SW technologies as well as lifecycle management for SARO.