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| Creating Knowledge with Information Repository Technology Knowing What No One Has Known Before February 2002 In 1979, after a particularly rainy and windy Midwestern night, nearly half of the four-acre roof of the Kemper sports arena in Kansas City, Mo., collapsed onto the empty seats inside. The usual cause—poor roof drainage —was initially suspected in the collapse of the sports arena's roof. However, drainage alone could not explain the extent of the destruction. After all, the roof was an engineering marvel, suspended above the arena by steel arms and columns separated from the building. This design was supposed to be nearly impervious to storm damage, able to nimbly flex, but not break, when buffeted by wind and rain.
Further investigation shed light on the complex combination of factors that led to the massive failure. Poor drainage allowed water to pool on the roof. Under the weight of the accumulating water, the roof flexed down, as it was designed to do, creating a deeper pool over certain areas. At worst, this should have caused a failure at the point where the water had pooled. However, the wind blew the water to other areas on the roof. In response, the roof flexed in a different direction, intensifying the movement of the water. In the end, this complex combination of poor drainage, rain, and wind, enhanced by the flexibility in the roof's design, caused an increasingly heavy load of water to shift until half of the roof finally collapsed en masse. Nothing in this phenomenon was forecasted by the designer's careful calculations. It was a condition unique in scale and complexity. Today, engineering of this type of structure has improved, but only after this great loss. But, what if you had a tool that hinted at this relationship between the roof's great flexibility and a rapidly shifting and increasing load? What if you could use this tool before construction began? Further, what if this tool's capabilities were not limited by the amount and complexity of the information, so that, as the system grew and changed, previously unknown relationships among its components could be discovered? Such a tool would mimic what we humans call intuition, the sudden insight that comes seemingly out of nowhere from what, at first, looks like unrelated information.
This “intuition” is the promise of information repository technology. One of the projects at the MITRE Langley site, led by Carl Schone, is demonstrating the potential of this technology to assist warfighters in highlighting the consequences of operational, organizational, procedural, and modernization decisions based on the relationships discovered by the repository. Information repositories contain collections of relationships among pieces of data and tools to refine those relationships. Repositories are not databases. In a database, relationships among the data are established as the database is created, based on the purpose of the database. By contrast, in a repository, relationships are discovered after collecting the data in a very generic model. Also, this process of discovery is evolutionary: The original collection of data need not be changed as new relationships are discovered. As an analogy, imagine an ancient researcher of human anatomy using a repository to determine how a collection of fluids, tissues, organs, and bones fits together. The repository would help this ancient Vesalius discover the complex relationships between the heart, arteries, and veins that make up the circulatory system. As this early anatomist discovered the circulatory system relationships, this process would hint at other potential relationships like the ones that exist between circulation and muscles, nerves and muscles, and so on. The Langley team, composed of Mark Shorter and Douglas Maldonado, is applying information repository technology to the collection of nodes, activities, and information exchanges in the North American Homeland Defense operational architecture. Shorter's previous prototypes included, among others, the Theater (as-is) operational architecture for command and control (C2) and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); and an integrated dictionary of terms, activities, nodes, and information elements for that same architecture. In all of these, Shorter has demonstrated that the repository technology's treatment of data as objects with multiple potential relationships is the key to evaluating the consequences of particular decisions on the entire C2&ISR enterprise.
In one of the prototypes, for example, the Langley team showed that a certain C2 process could not operate because it was overwhelmed by the amount of information received from parallel processes at other nodes. While this finding may seem trivial at face value, the fact that it was discovered, without any prior notion of its existence, as part of the routine evaluation of the data, is what makes the technology and the work done at Langley in applying it so promising. What's more, this example also showed that any system improvement that ignored this relationship was likely not to work as expected. The Langley prototypes are also demonstrating how the technology maintains growing layers of relationships among the data as the data grows in complexity. Depending on resources, the MITRE Langley prototypes in information repositories will evolve into a capability that will help the Air Force architecture authorities manage the collection of Air Force activities, nodes, information elements, systems, and standards. Repository technology and the pioneering work at the MITRE Langley site may some day play a critical role in the modernization of C2&ISR capabilities as repositories are used to fathom the impacts of the combination of doctrine, operating procedures, and system modernization decisions. Warfighters will be able to understand the consequences of their decisions and determine how the consequences might limit their capabilities. Ultimately, what is “magic” about information repository technology is its recognition that no one can forecast the future in all its complexity and variety, and that what is mostly needed is a way of discovering, through the “fog” of today's realities, the potential future consequences of today's decisions. For warfighters, in the end, repositories and the work at the MITRE Langley site promise to exploit their collective intuition and wisdom in discovering and mitigating these consequences. Page last updated: August 12, 2002 | Top of page |
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