Model based fusion and services automation support

This paper will report on ongoing research and development to support automated fusion at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory centered on human-collected information and processing. The overall approach for our research is three pronged: exploit soft information sources such as human-generated reports and open source information, develop discrete services, and focus on the end-user. Soft information sources provide information on relationships between individuals, organizations, locations, time, and events. Extracting this information and structuring it for efficient computer processing is a challenge which must be overcome to provide better analytical support to the user. Discrete services provide for the development of components which can be composed into a system. Processing services such as text extractors, web crawlers, and graph processors within a Services- Oriented Architecture provides modularity and scalability. The focus on the end-user grounds the research in the real needs of soldiers on the ground in the near-term and the future.