Automated Military-Civilian Information Sharing

Homeland security operations would greatly benefit from bi-directional information sharing between military and civilian systems. Military-civilian information sharing, however, presents a myriad of unique technical and nontechnical challenges. Technical challenges include interoperability issues among disparate, stove-piped systems; heterogeneity of data formats; security (particularly in cross-domain sense); entitlement to data; and lack of a uniform lexicon. Non-technical challenges include the disparate operating protocols and communication styles of different communities of practice; legal, privacy, and regulatory issues surrounding the sharing of various types of data; ambiguity in authority and jurisdictional relationships amongst the different organizations in an information-sharing network; and lack of a common framework for command and control. These difficulties can be exacerbated in ad-hoc coalitions, for instance large-scale disaster response. We describe our ongoing effort to create a field-deployable platform to enable bi-directional automated information sharing among military and civilian systems. This platform uses ontologies designed by multiple subject matter experts to drive a peer-to-peer information exchange network in the syndromic bio-surveillance domain. In addition to technical issues, our research also addresses secure data sharing in the context of compliance and privacy regulations, particularly context-dependent entitlement. In addition to our findings, we will also discuss gaps that were identified as the result of this research and our vision of areas for future research