Robert Neches

Enabling technology for knowledge sharing

Building new knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing new knowledge bases from scratch. It could instead be done by assembling reusable components. System developers would then only need to worry about creating the specialized knowledge and reasoners new to the specific task of their system. This new system would interoperate with existing systems, using them to perform some of its reasoning. In this way, declarative knowledge, problem- solving techniques, and reasoning services could all be shared among systems. This approach would facilitate building bigger and better systems cheaply. The infrastructure to support such sharing and reuse would lead to greater ubiquity of these systems, potentially transforming the knowledge industry. This article presents a vision of the future in which knowledge-based system development and operation is facilitated by infrastructure and technology for knowledge sharing. It describes an initiative currently under way to develop these ideas and suggests steps that must be taken in the future to try to realize this vision.

Enhanced Maintenance and Explanation of Expert Systems Through Explicit Models of Their Development

Principled development techniques could greatly enhance the understandability of expert systems for both users and system developers. Current systems have limited explanatory capabilities and present maintenance problems because of a failure to explicitly represent the knowledge and reasoning that went into their design. This paper describes a paradigm for constructing expert systems which attempts to identify that tacit knowledge, provide means for capturing it in the knowledge bases of expert systems, and, apply it towards more perspicuous machine-generated explanations and more consistent and maintainable system organization.

SFINKS: Secure Focused Information, News, and Knowledge Sharing

Cross-agency collaboration and sharing of digital data is critical to respond to or prevent threats to U.S. interests. While traditional hierarchical information sharing approaches ensure that only relevant information is delivered to authorized nodes, the resulting organizational overhead severely impedes timely sharing of critical information. Although alternative approaches to secure data release have previously been proposed, they all have had severe practical limitations. We are developing SFINKS - a flexible collaboration platform that enables secure and focused information sharing across organizations. SFINKS uses two key technologies developed at ISI to support a new concept of fine-grained semantically controlled information visibility. The Hands infrastructure provides a semantic network-based data model, search and filtering capabilities, distributed systems support and fine-grained control of resource visibility. The Adaptive Trust Negotiation and Access Control (ATNAC) provides flexible access control and trust management.

CLASP: integrating term subsumption systems and production systems

The general architecture and an implementation of a classification-based production system (CLASP) are presented. The main objective is to extend the benefits of classification capabilities in frame systems to the developers of rule-based systems. Two major processes of CLASP, a semantic pattern matcher and a pattern classifier, are described. The semantic pattern matcher extends the pattern matching capabilities of rule-based systems through the use of terminological knowledge. The pattern classifier enables the system to compute a rules specificity, which is useful for conflict resolution, based on the semantics of its left-hand side. The paradigm not only enhances the reasoning capabilities of rule-based systems, but also helps to reduce the cost of maintaining such systems because definitional knowledge is explicitly represented in a form that facilitates sharing and minimizes duplication of effort. >

Composing Web services for large-scale tasks

By making it easy to explore combinations of multiple Web services, Eurasia helps users tackle large-scale information-management tasks and adapt and reuse the steps involved.

Disaster and mass casualty events in the pediatric population

Recent disasters involving pediatric victims have highlighted the need for pediatric hospital disaster preparedness. Although children represent 25% of the U.S. population, there are significant gaps in pediatric disaster preparedness across the country. Disaster planners and others tend to overlook pediatric needs, and therefore plans are often inadequate. To establish an effective hospital and community-based pediatric disaster management system, administrative and hospital leadership are key. Disaster planners and hospital leadership should establish and improve their management of pediatric victims in the event of a disaster through staff training, family reunification planning, and use of available pediatric disaster management tools.

Access Control Policies for Semantic Networks

As web-based technologies mature, dynamic graphs of interlinked resources are replacing hierarchical catalogs as means for storing and organizing information. Such graphs,or semantic networks, often span multiple static and dynamic resources from a variety of sources. It is often highly desirable to give users access only to parts of the semantic network without breaking its logical continuity or consistency.Traditional access control models, such as mandatory, discretionary and role-based access controls, are ill-suited for these new resource structures. New models that allow users to specify access rights in terms of semantic relationships between various objects within semantic networks are needed. In this paper we discuss requirements for an access control model for semantic networks and present our approach and an initial implementation. We also describe end user tools for policy specification and assessment.

Using robotic telecommunications to triage pediatric disaster victims

PURPOSE During a disaster, hospitals may be overwhelmed and have an insufficient number of pediatric specialists available to care for injured children. The aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of remotely providing pediatric expertise via a robot to treat pediatric victims. METHODS In 2008, Los Angeles County held 2 drills involving telemedicine. The first was the Tri-Hospital drill in which 3 Los Angeles County hospitals, one being a pediatric hospital, participated. The disaster scenario involved a Metrolink train crash, resulting in a large surge of traumatic injuries. The second drill involved multiple agencies and was called the Great California Shakeout, a simulated earthquake exercise. The telemedicine equipment installed is an InTouch Health, Inc, Santa Barbara, CA robotic telecommunications system. We used mixed-methods to evaluate the use of telemedicine during these drills. RESULTS Pediatric specialists successfully provided remote triage and treatment consults of victims via the robot. The robot proved to be a useful means to extend resources and provide expert consult if pediatric specialists were unable to physically be at the site. CONCLUSION Telemedicine can be used in the delayed treatment areas as well as for training first receivers to collaborate with specialists in remote locations to triage and treat seriously injured pediatric victims.

Dynamic coordination of information management services for processing dynamic web content

Dynamic Web content provides us with time-sensitive and continuously changing data. To glean up-to-date information, users need to regularly browse, collect and analyze this Web content. Without proper tool support this information management task is tedious, time-consuming and error prone, especially when the quantity of the dynamic Web content is large, when many information management services are needed to analyze it, and when underlying services/network are not completely reliable. This paper describes a multi-level, lifecycle (design-time and run-time) coordination mechanism that enables rapid, efficient development and execution of information management applications that are especially useful for processing dynamic Web content. Such a coordination mechanism brings dynamism to coordinating independent, distributed information management services. Dynamic parallelism spawns/merges multiple execution service branches based on available data, and dynamic run-time reconfiguration coordinates service execution to overcome faulty services and bottlenecks. These features enable information management applications to be more efficient in handling content and format changes in Web resources, and enable the applications to be evolved and adapted to process dynamic Web content.

Integrating geographic information systems, spatial digital libraries and information spaces for conducting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in urban environments

The GeoWorlds system integrates geographic information systems, spatial digital libraries and other information analysis, retrieval and collaboration tools. It supports multiple applications ranging from intelligence gathering to urban planning, to crisis management and response. Teams can rapidly assemble collections of document-based information from the World-Wide Web and other specialized information sources, visualize geospatial distribution of these collections and monitor events that might change conclusions or decisions formed on the basis of an initial information set. This functionality is provided within a framework that supports both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration over finding, filtering and organizing information and presenting it in a rich visualization environment.