Knowledge Synthesis Capabilities

Critical infrastructure protection analysts and modelers require vast amounts of data and information for their critical
infrastructure interdependency work. To help CIP analysts and modelers meet the challenge of producing information from
large amounts of data, the Knowledge Synthesis effort provides a secure, access-controlled, organized, and
searchable view on the data for rapid retrieval and update through a suite a capabilities delivered via web-based tools
and programmatic interfaces.

Four secure, remotely accessible knowledge synthesis tools provide a suite of capabilities to allow CIP
analysts and modelers and their tools to collaborate and share data.

 

Document Archive and Collaboratory

The CIP KM Portal provides a central searchable repository for CIP information, data, and tools. It organizes information to support multiple viewpoints via taxonomies (such as Infrastructure, Project, and Progam) and delivers/receives content via several secure, remote-accessible mechanisms, including a web browser for familiar web access, a WebDAV folder for intiuitive drag-and-drop access, and Web Services for programmable access by tools. Access to the CIP KM Portal is restricted by firewall and access controls.

 

 

Collaborators and partners can gain access by contacting a member of the CIP KM Portal network management team. The WebDAV folder view of the CIP KM Portal provides a convenient drag-and-drop mechanism for data population and retrieval. In this view, folders correspond directly to taxonomy category nodes.

 

 

Simulation and Analysis Results Library

SimLib stores simulations, analytical model runs, analyses, and all associated data for organized long-term storage and rapid retrieval. With the ability to retrieve studies and analyses that are similar to an input scenario, SimLib facilitates the rapid discovery of related scenarios and supports "what if" assessment, causal analysis, policy analysis, and education and training.

Modelers can use SimLib to rapidly generate new models and simulations using existing models and simulations as templates.

 

A programmatic web services interface allows custom CIP modeling tools to provide automated interaction with SimLib, avoiding tedious manual data manipulation.

 

Web Search Archive

Part of the data gathering phase of the work done by CIP analysts and modelers involvesaccess to external web-based data. This includes the needle-in-a-haystack hunt for salient information among the plethora of results returned by search engines.
The Web Search Archive Tool facilitates this effort by capturing web pages and web links and allowing analysts to associate them with the question being asked. Subsequent queries to WeSCaT that match a previously asked question will return an archived list of web links and cached pages that were found to be salient in the past. In addition to reducing redundant search effort, this capability also provides persistence for transient web-based data used in analyses.

WeSCaT integrates directly into the user's browser as a toolbar to provide a convenient mechanism for searching, tagging, and capturing web-based data. Captured web pages are full-text searchable from the CIP KM Portal.

 

The Metadata Repository

The Metadata Repository utilizes a standard protocol (OAI-PHM) to retrieve metadata from remote sources and combine it with
local metadata to provide a federated search capability. Searches in the Metadata Repository span all the other Knowledge
Synthesis tools (CIP KM Portal, SimLib, and WeSCaT) as well as metadata about the local spatial datasets and metadata from the
WatchDog tool that is remotely hosted at LANL. The Metadata Repository also uses the OAI-PMH to make its metadata accessible to external collaborators. The Metadata Repository provides a mechanism for analysts and modelers to search data from not only all the Knowledge Synthesis tools, but metadata from external tools such as LANL's WatchDog all at once in a single query.