Enabling portable cloud-based semantics for fusing intelligence analysis at the tactical edge

Cloud computing architectures are growing in popularity in military and industry applications. However, while cloud databases are highly useful for fast retrieval of basic information, which often exists in tabled or columned formats, challenges exist in utilizing them for data sharing between intelligence analysts who rely upon large amounts of HUMINT data sources for their analytics. In such cases, complex entities and relations (often captured in ontologies) are of interest to the user. Semantic technologies can capture complex entities and relations, but historically have not scaled well. Combining cloud architectures with semantic technologies has shown promise for providing complex data analytics at scale. However problems still exist for intelligence analysts who must operate at the tactical edge, in disconnected environments, with limited cloud access. This paper describes a system developed by Modus Operandi called STRIDE (Semantically-enabled Technology for Reconnaissance and Intelligence in Disconnected Environments) which extracts mission-specific information from the cloud to provide analysts with portable analytics in the form of a semantic wiki that can gather and store information while disconnected and integrate that data back into the cloud by providing entity association and disambiguation upon mission completion.