Information Operations: Creating New Frontiers for Data Fusion and Mining Technology

Abstract : The recent developments in the definition of doctrine for information operations and the implementation of systems to enable the conduct of those operations pose new challenges to the application of data fusion and data mining technologies. This paper describes the basic reasoning processes underlying both data fusion and data mining, and discusses the critical role of these processes to enable the development of increasingly complex information operations (IO). The development of IO, this paper asserts, has opened three challenging frontiers of development that must be addressed by data fusion and mining developers. These frontiers include: (1) The need to apply the processes beyond the physical domain, to encompass the symbolic and cognitive domains of reality, (2) The need to extend the processes to deal with subjective and qualitative data, and (3) The need to develop collaborative fusion and mining processes that collaborate with human teams to solve complex problems.