A Maritime Information Exchange Model (MIEM) for Sharing Actionable Intelligence

The 9/11 Commission Report and related Presidential directives have highlighted the need to share information between different government agencies, military services, and international allies. With sponsorship from the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), NRL provided the technical leadership for the Comprehensive Maritime Awareness (CMA) Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (JCTD) aimed specifically at developing and demonstrating effective means for sharing maritime intelligence to improve interdiction of suspicious or threatening vessels, cargo, and people. To accomplish sharing in an effective manner, we need to enable humans and computers to understand situational intelligence so that they can respond quickly to significant events. As the number of sensors and interworked systems increase, the data volumes continue to soar, so people will need to rely on the machines to assess and filter more and more of the data. Human attention will need to focus on key events and making important judgments. The Department of Defense (DoD) plans to improve information sharing by making information assets understandable and accessible. We term information understandable when it consists of familiar types and values. We consider it accessible when computerized services can obtain it for us. Thus, one goal of the CMA JCTD was to make actionable intelligence about maritime situations understandable and accessible in that way. The key to achieving that goal was to create a set of types and values that could be used to describe beliefs about maritime entities, relations, and events, as well as the evidence for those beliefs. The Martime Information Exchange Model (MIEM) addresses that need by prescribing how to express such beliefs and evidence.