Information management seeks to provide rapid and assured situation awareness and decision making through delivery of timely, reliable, and actionable information to warfighters and systems from across the enterprise. To do this, we must be able to create a resilient information management infrastructure, organize infromation, provide universal access to it, and ultimately deliver quality information to meet mission needs. We seek to support secure data sharing, and information brokering and federation in a resource-constrained environment.

There are several building blocks of resilient IM. In a service-oriented environment, we must be able to secure the services themselves, create alternate configuration options to support rapid reconfiguration as the missions, systems, or environment changes. Finally the infrastructure must be able to sense these changes and respond appropriately.

To organize information, we must be able to securely label information and manage metadata associated with it. We must be able to index disparate infromation and discover, capture, and manage semantically related information. Finally, we need to manage the lifecycle of information from creation to archiving, to destruction.

To provide universal access, we must have verifiable accountability for all steps in the dissemination and release process. We need federated information spaces to span system, functional, organizational, and national boundaries. We need extensible interoperability and demand-driven scalability (both to large-scale and to small-scale embedded applications).

Delivery of quality information requires the the information be prioritized, tailored, and fit-for-purpose. We must be able to update critical information in a timely manner, and be able to discover actionable and verifiable information.

Several concepts relating to the role of information management systems in combat situations have been promulgated including the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board concept of the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI). When fully implemented, the JBI will be a powerful Combat Information Management system drawing on four key concepts: information exchange through “publish and subscribe”; transforming data into knowledge through fuselets; distributed collaboration through shared, updated knowledge objects; and assigned unit incorporation via force templates.

Within the Information Directorate, information management is a cross-cutting technology focus, especially when integrated with other enabling technologies such and advanced computing architectures and tactical networking. For further information on the JBI, prospective, Associates should read the 1999 Scientific Advisory Board Report entitled "Building the Joint Battlespace Infosphere" found at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA430346&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf.

 

key words

Service oriented architecture; Cross-domain information sharing; Digital libraries; Enterprise integration; Information fusion; Information management;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants