Enterprise Situational Awareness at MITRE: Defining the Next Generation Internet

Situational Awareness is a critical mission need for MITRE's Department of Defense (DoD) sponsors. Solutions for Situational Awareness need to be interoperable, dynamically adaptable, and extensible in a Network Centric environment. At the same time, there is a growing need within MITRE to better maneuver through the ever increasing amount of information on our intranet and the World Wide Web (www), necessitating solutions for enhanced integration of information sources across the Enterprise. We believe that the key to solving both challenges is to apply semantic technology, since these emerging solutions transcend language and specific implementations and offer integration at the semantic level. Further, this technology is inherently extensible, and builds the foundation for dynamic integration and a fully automated Machine-to-Machine (M2M) enabled enterprise. To demonstrate the potential, we initiated an effort to apply semantic technology to achieve Enterprise Situational Awareness at MITRE. We built an abstraction layer over the existing MITRE Information Infrastructure (MII) to exploit existing information sources and link this information together in a meaningful way. A number of use cases were identified for the effort, entitled MITRE Enterprise Situational Awareness (MESA). With our Center for Information and Technology (CI&T) partners, we selected a semantic "Dynamic Topic Watch" application as our demonstration. This application dynamically provides news, events and other information surrounding a user's specified topics of interest, including technical events, Community of Interest (CoI) news, research results, vendor announcements, publications and more. This was achieved by reusing and tailoring existing ontologies to represent enterprise objects such as people, events, and projects. We built an ontology based on the existing MITRE subject Taxonomy (MST) and automated the process of linking enterprise objects to the concepts that describe them. We linked existing data sources on the MII and Web with these ontologies to support query and subscription to the semantic Topic Watch service. The prototype capability has been deployed on the MII. This paper describes the solution we built, and summarizes our findings and recommendations.