Enterprise search tasks in IVHM practice

Integrated vehicle health management tasks both manage large flows of data and access large stores of textual information. These tasks are special cases of the general integrated problem of data mining (usually nontextual data in databases) and enterprise search (search for textual information in proprietary document collections.) This paper reviews current approaches with particular attention to problems characteristic of IVHM searches. Emerging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software tools use taxonomies and ontologies to find documents which otherwise be missed, to narrow searches that return too many results, and to navigate through large search results. Ontologies are formal models of knowledge for particular domains. They structure information so it can be shared - across organizations and between software tools. We discuss sources of aerospace taxa and ontologies, security considerations, and some open issues in ontology representation