Army Knowledge Online (AKO) Project

Overview

The Army Knowledge Online (AKO) program is, as defined in their executive summary, a portal that "allows soldiers and DA civilians to quickly find and receive the latest knowledge on subjects of their choosing. Portal users gain quick access to Army installation and travel information, training links, the latest Army news, and other knowledge centers across the Army."

It is our contention that to achieve this mission the AKO must use the technologies that have come to be categorized as Semantic Web or Web 3.0, particularly including the Semantic Web languages RDF, RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language OWL.

Despite the development and maturation of Semantic Web technologies, significant challenges still remain to the deployment of these technologies at the scale needed by AKO or similar organizations. Particularly keen among these are the need for scaling to much larger datasets and knowledge bases than are currently available and the need to create interactive technologies (essentially a Semantic Web read/write browser) that could be used by military personnel to find, analyze and particularly to write or extend AKO data resources on the Web.

This DARPA funded project has three main tasks - (i) Web-scale Reasoning (RPI lead), (ii) Linked-Data Browse and Query Capabilities (MIT lead), and (iii) Identification of DARPA-hard Problems at AKO (RPI and MIT).

The MIT led research is aimed at enabling the creation, linking and querying of data resources at the scale needed by AKO. This will include (i) enabling linked-data browsing in the Tabulator, (ii) adding read/write capabilities for both data and policies in the Tabulator, (iii) allowing linked data to be queried in the Tabulator, (iv) using the Tabulator to create linked data from structured data in CSV or other such formats and to embed metadata in non-data assets, and (v) working with RPI to identify possible opportunities for Semantic Web technologies at AKO as well as identify hard problems to be solved in developing and deploying "Web 3.0" capabilities for AKO.

Status

• The Semantic Web Widget Library is a library for creating user interfaces that work with the Semantic Web. This project aims to provide a useful set of tools for viewing and editing Semantic Web data that can easily be integrated into any Website.

Team

This proposal is funded by DARPA and the team is lead by RPI with MIT as a subcontractor.

References

• A Widget Library for Creating Policy-Aware Semantic Web Applications, MEng thesis, James Hollenbach, 2010
• Henry Story, Bruno Harbulot, Ian Jacobi and Mike Jones, FOAF+SSL: RESTful Authentication for the Social Web, SPOT2009 - Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web workshop at ESWC 2009, June 2009.
• RDF Policy-based URI Access Control for Content Authoring on the Social Semantic Web, Joe Presbrey, Undergraduate Advanced Project, Spring 2009.
• Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler, Sussman, Information Accountability (alt link),Communications of the ACM, Jun. 2008, 82-87
  
• Policy Aware Web, funded by NSF, a collaboration between MINDSWAP and DIG to work toward creating discretionary, rules-based access for the World Wide Web

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