A collaborative distributed privacy-sensitive decision support system for monitoring heterogeneous data sources

This paper introduces MCDS, a multi-organizational collaborative decision support system that makes an effort to support seamless integration of humans and software agents for collaborative emergency preparedness and threat management in a distributed multi-party environment with heterogeneous social and organizational cultures. MCDS offers mechanisms for systematic detection, tracking, and management of emerging threat-structures in the context of the existing assets, algorithms for mining distributed multi-party data in a privacy-sensitive manner, archival and retrieval of case histories, and relevance feedback-based personalization. The paper provides an overview of a few modules and describes two ongoing applications of this collaborative problem solving technology.