Knowledge acquisition and text retrieval issues for an intelligent universal situational awareness (USA) system

The problem of detecting and countering potential threats requires a synergistic conjunction of intelligent technologies with a view towards that goal. This paper describes a Blackboard architecture and focuses on two important components of the system: knowledge acquisition and text retrieval. Objects for directed mining and linking are invoked as rule consequents in the Blackboard architecture. The Blackboard architecture provides for chaining and incremental knowledge acquisition (including maintenance). Using information hiding, objects can be visually displayed in the form of a tree to facilitate acquisition and maintenance operations. Finally, projected and restricted database views can be analyzed by a distinct high-level knowledge base to generate natural language reports. Most importantly, these reports provide the analyst with immediate feedback, which serves to catalyze the generation of subsequent queries.