Information integration for counter terrorism activities: requirements for context mediation

The National Research Council has noted that "[A]lthough there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counterterrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other databases and the extraction of meaningful and timely information." In this paper we present examples of these problems and a technology developed at MIT, called context mediation, which provides an approach for addressing these problems.