Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization
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Siegel, Michael; Madnick, Stuart; Choucri, Nazli; Zhu, Harry; Haghseta, Farnaz; Moulton, Allen; ... Show more Show less![Thumbnail](/bitstream/handle/1721.1/689/Laboratory%20for%20Information%20Globalization%204350-01.pdf.jpg?sequence=4&isAllowed=y)
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The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization,
growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of
economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global
politics. This rapidly changing environment has information demands that surpass
existing capabilities for information access, interpretation, and overall use, thus
hindering our abilities to address emergent and complex global challenges, such as
terrorism and other security threats. This reality has serious implications for two
diverse domains of scholarship: international relations (IR) in political science and
information technology (IT). Unless IT advances remain "one step ahead" of emergent
realities and complexities, strategies for better understanding and responding to critical
global challenges will be severely impeded. For example, more so now than ever, the
U.S. Office of Counter-Terrorism and the newly-created Office of Homeland Security
rely on intelligence information from all over the world to develop strategic responses
to security threats. However, relevant information is stored in various regions
throughout the world and by diverse agencies in different media, formats, and contexts.
Intelligent integration of information is fundamental to developing policies to anticipate
and strengthen protection against terrorist threats or attacks in the United States.
This Project's activities, and relationships with its collaborators, will be coordinated
through a newly formed joint Laboratory for Information Globalization and
Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT). LIGHT will address information needs in the
IR domain, focusing on the conflict realm, which deals with emergent risks, threats,
and uncertainties of potentially global scale and scope related to: (a) crises, (b)
conflicts and war; and (c) anticipation, monitoring and early warning. The goals of this
initiative are to: (1) improve understanding of the types of IR information needs for
decision making and institutional performance under varying degrees of risk and
uncertainty; (2) design and implement the System for Harmonized Information
Processing, to facilitate access to and correct interpretation of essential information
that is critical to policy and research in the IR realm, as well as to other similarly
complex domains, and (3) advance developments in the use of information
technologies to facilitate such interdisciplinary research and to contribute to new
education approaches, tools, and methods. Increasingly, addressing problems central
to national and global interests in complex domains such as IR requires the use of
technologies that easily combine observations from disparate sources, using different
interpretations, for different purposes, and by a wide range of users. Critical advances
in IT capabilities must span multiple domains (e.g., economic, political, geographic,
commercial, and demographic), diverse contexts (i.e., meanings, languages,
assumptions), and a multiplicity of contending agents (i.e., states, governments,
corporations, international institutions). The technology-related research will focus on
acquiring and enhancing information to serve user requirements both over individual
domains (i.e., a single shared ontology) and across multiple domains, which are
necessary for addressing complex challenges. The core innovation is reflected in the
notion of a Collaborative Domain Space (CDS), within which applications in a
common domain can share, analyze, modify, and develop information. For applications
that span multiple domains we provide for a Collection of CDSs to link shared
concepts in distinct domains. Moreover, we will develop the System for Harmonized
Information Processing that incorporates CDSs as a basis for knowledge
representation and includes all the necessary reasoning algorithms required to support
information processing over a range of heterogeneous sources and applications.
The development of the system described above builds upon prior work. The political
science IR work will draw on an earlier Internet-based experimental "platform" for
exploring forms of information generation, provision, and integration across multiple
domains, regions, languages, and epistemologies which are relevant to complex but
domain-specific applications, the Global System for Sustainable Development
(GSSD). The IT component builds on work on the Context Interchange project
(COIN) focused on the integration of a range of distributed heterogeneous information
sources (e.g., financial, supply chain, disaster relief) using ontologies, databases,
context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies. Both groups have
considerable experience with the organization and management of large scale,
international, distributed, and diverse research projects, including cross-national (e.g.,
China, Middle East, Europe) and institutional (private, public, national and
international) agencies.
The anticipated results will apply to any complex domain with multiple entities that rely
on heterogeneous distributed data to address and resolve compelling problems. This
initiative is supported by a network of international collaborators from (a) scientific and
research institutions, (b) business and industry, and (c) national and international
agencies. Expected research products include: a software platform, IR-based
knowledge repository, and diverse applications in policy, research, and education
which are anticipated to significantly impact the way complex organizations, and
society in general, understand and manage critical global challenges.
Date issued
2002-06-07Series/Report no.
MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper;4350-01
Keywords
Harmonization Technologies, electronic connectivity, Information Globalization