Posts Tagged ‘semantic wiki’

Milcord Participates in Cobra Gold 12 Military Exercises in Thailand

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

From January-February 2012 Milcord participated in Cobra Gold military exercises in Thailand, demonstrating our MARCIM (US Marine Corps Civil Information Management) Semantic Wiki. This is the second year we have participated in the exercises; last year, Laura Cassani represented Milcord by presenting our sociocultural knowledge base. You can read Laura’s post here for background on the exercises, and details about our participation in Cobra Gold 2011. Since then, we’ve developed another knowledge base built upon a Semantic Wiki platform, tailored to support the Civil Information Management needs identified in Thailand.

Conducting a training on the Semantic Wiki at the CJCMOTF in Korat, Thailand

The MARCIM Semantic Wiki supports real time data collection, visualization, and analysis by automatically ingesting assessments and surveys conducted by Civil Military Operations (CMO) teams submitted via mobile devices, and semantically tagging and generating relationships with the field collected data. During Cobra Gold 2012, the MARCIM Semantic Wiki was placed in the hands of the exercise’s planning and operations team. This team, stationed at the CJCMOTF (Combined Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force) in Korat, Thailand, is responsible for overseeing all CMO activity within the country. I spent three weeks observing, interacting with, and supporting the users, and, based on their feedback, we customized the Wiki so that it could best assist and advance the efforts of CMO personnel. It was incredible to see how the Wiki evolved throughout the exercises from being something that was built on a conceptual level by Milcord to being a living, breathing tool that took shape around user feedback as we worked continuously to tailor the Wiki so that it could confer the utmost benefit to the troops. On a daily basis within the CJCMOTF, the staff used the Wiki to submit their daily reports, analyze demographic information within the area of operations, monitor team activity, and visualize responses to surveys and assessments.

Dynamic pie chart analyzing the primary medical issues of patients at a flood relief medical event

During my time in Thailand, I gained an appreciation for the nature of the data collected during CMO missions; information is collected about the local infrastructure, medical needs of the population, progress being made at engineering sites, as well as sentiments of the Thai people toward the troops. Instead of placing this data onto inaccessible hard drives where it is unlikely to be utilized, the Wiki structures the data and places it into an analyzable form for users, thus presenting the value of the aggregated data to the troops. In addition to helping the troops understand the impact they’re making on the ground, the aggregation and analysis of this data also prevents duplication of effort by CMO teams by alerting them to what has already been achieved within the area of operation, and what activities and projects should be prioritized in the future.

Automated tables and charts analyzing the progress being made at an engineering site

Although our work within the CJCMOTF kept me busy, I was still able to sneak in some sightseeing. I visited the Weekend Market in Bangkok (the largest market in Thailand), toured the Royal Palace and Wat Pho, and visited Khmer ruins within Korat. The entire trip was a culinary escapade, and I quickly developed an appetite for som tam (spicy papaya salad with shrimp) and chai yen (Thai iced tea).

Since our participation in Cobra Gold 2012, we have been invited to participate in a number of other exercises, including Balikatan 2012 exercise in the Philippines, Pacific Partnership 2012 exercise in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and Black Sea Rotational Force 2012 operation in Eastern Europe. We look forward to posting further updates on the evolution of the MARCIM Semantic Wiki as we progressively gain insights from these operations and exercises!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Wiki Surveys for Social Science Research

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Surveys and interviews form the central methodology for analyzing and discovering attitudes and opinions in social science research. With the advent of Web, online surveys have become an efficient way for researchers to collect and analyze large amounts of data. The popularity of the online survey tools like SurveyMonkey , Zoomerang, SurveyGizmo , etc. are testament to the productivity enabled by surveys. However, surveys represent a top-down rigid methodology forcing the survey designer to account for all possible answers up front, which is an impossible feat. In contrast, interviews allow the unanticipated information to bubble up bottoms up from the respondents. For instance, Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), Afghan Perceptions and Experiences with Corruption: A National Survey 2010 primary data, involves interviewing randomly selected 6,500 respondents in 32 provinces on over 100 questions that deal with sectors where people experienced corruption; levels of bribes people paid to obtain services; what type of access people had to essential services; who people trusted to combat corruption; and experiences with corruption in the judiciary, police, and land management. However, the interview methodology is expensive and time-consuming as it requires implementation by research companies with expertise in effective research design, and precise management of data collection over several months.

Is there an alternative to surveys and interviews in social science research? Prof. Salganik’s team at Princeton came up with a hybrid approach, “wiki surveys”, that combines the structure of a survey with the open-endedness of an interview. To date, various organizations have created more than 1000 wiki surveys on the project Web site – All Our Ideas, generating in 45,000 ideas with 2 million votes. Wiki surveys range from the New York City Mayor’s Office’s engagement with citizens in shaping the city’s long term sustainability plan to the Catholic Relief Services surveying their 4000 employees to find out what makes an ideal relief worker. The figure below shows how the third question in Tactical Conflict Assessment Planning Framework (TCAPF) would be be implemented as a wiki survey:

tcapf wiki survey.jpg

Inspired by extending the kittenwar concept to ideas, the user interface guides the respondent to choose between two random alternatives, while encouraging the respondents to add their ideas into the mix of alternative responses. The additional ideas are added into the survey’s marketplace and voted up or down by the other survey-takers. Prof. Salganik says that “One of the patterns we see consistently is that ideas that are uploaded by users sometimes score better than the best ideas that started it off. Because no matter how hard you try, there are just ideas out there that you don’t know.”

All Our ideas have some basic visualization features to make sense of the wiki survey responses. Here is the visualization for the responses – “What do you think the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) should be like?”:

DPLA Survey Reponse.jpg

It is worth noting that the top scoring 15 ideas starting with DPLA interoperability with Government Printing Office (GPO), Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), an National Records Archive Administration (NARA) are all uploaded ideas not in the original set of alternatives. A powerful argument for crowd sourcing!

Admittedly, we still need boots on the ground to collect TCAPF data in Afghanistan given the demographics of the people we want to reach. On the other hand, wiki surveys hold great potential in reaching the younger generation fueling the Arab spring and the like.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Research Brief | No Comments »

Tribal Human Terrain of Afghanistan

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Under the sponsorship of the OSD Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) program, we are developing a semantic wiki for Complex Operations. The envisioned operational impact of our effort is to foster collaboration and sharing of knowledge for whole-of-government approach, and to improve COIN/SSTR operations analysis and execution by focusing on population as center of gravity. The development of such a wiki presents several challenges that include the broad domain area of knowledge complex operations require, a large number of doctrine publications to wikify and semantify, several out of print key references, etc. With these challenges, we saw an opportunity to develop an open source culturepedia for Afghan and Pakistan human terrain as such knowledge is not aggregated and not readily available.

The Complex Operations wiki currently contains more than 1,000 articles on the various tribal dynamics and locational knowledge for the Afghanistan and Pakistan region, outlining tribal meta-knowledge such as the sub-groups, primary locations, traditional alliances, and traditional disputes of various groups to support situational awareness about the human terrain. Here is the wiki page for the covered Afghanistan Organizational Groups. We have created over 150 concept maps (an example shown below) to capture the knowledge about 1,000 ethnic groups, tribes, sub-tribes, clans within Afghanistan and Pakistan region to make this human terrain knowledge readily accessible to the complex operations practitioner.

tribal concept map.png

Tribal Tree in Afghanistan (click to view full-size)

Our use of a semantic wiki platform enables the representation of the human terrain knowledge as facts and relationships. For instance, the wiki page for the Achakzai tribal group lists the the known facts and relationships about this ethnic group both a human consumable form using semantic forms:

Achakzai Semantic Form.tiff

, and a machine consumable form as semantic RDF relationships:

Achakzai RDF.tiff

Factbox (click to view full-size)

By inspecting the semantic form, the reader can deduce that Achakzai is a sub-tribe of Zirak, which is a sub-tribe of the Durrani super-tribe, primarily located in the Chora and Khas Uruzgan districts, and traditionally have disputes with the Nurzai, Panjpai and Kakar tribes. The representation of this knowledge in a semantic wiki has the additional advantage for faceted browsing and answers engine queries. For instance, the semantic wiki can answer questions like “What are the tribes in Kandahar Province and their traditional disputes?” as a table which gets automatically updated every time a new tribe in this province is added to the wiki:
Tribes in Kandahar.tiff There are also several groups in Afghanistan that do not organize around tribal kinship ties, including Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras. In addition to tribal affiliation, social organizations such as solidarity groups – a group of people that acts as a single unit and organizes on the basis of some shared identity, and patronage networks – led by local warlord or khan – play an important role in understanding of the human terrain. Afghan and Pakistan human terrain and situational awareness knowledge base can be extended to include other populations of interest to the community, such as Yemen or Somalia.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Research Brief | No Comments »

Semantic Wikis for Communities of Practice

Monday, September 28th, 2009

The term community of practice (CoP) was coined by Jean Lave, a social anthropologist. Its value in learning was popularized by Etienne Wenger, an educational theorist. CoP denotes a group of people who share a passion about a common topic, and deepen their knowledge and expertise in this domain by interacting with each other on an ongoing basis. According to Etienne Wenger, a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions and its characteristics can be captured by:

The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a social network. “It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people”.

The community. “In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other”.

The practice. “Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction”.

In developing and nurturing Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger talks about the diverse and distributed internal leadership:
• The inspirational leadership provided by thought leaders and recognized experts
• The day-to-day leadership provided by those who organize activities
• The classificatory leadership provided by those who collect and organize information in order to document practices
• The interpersonal leadership provided by those who weave the community’s social fabric
• The boundary leadership provided by those who connect the community to other communities
• The institutional leadership provided by those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies, in particular the official hierarchy
• The cutting-edge leadership provided by those who shepherd “out-of-the-box” initiatives.
McDermott goes further and states learning is in the relationships between people:

Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… Learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.

In the book Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder argue that while communities of practice develop organically, a carefully crafted design can drive their evolution. Here are the seven principles:
1. Design for evolution
2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives
3. Invite different levels of participation
4. Develop both public and private community spaces
5. Focus on value
6. Combine familiarity and excitement
7. Create a rhythm for the community

There is additional research on what makes online CoP’s flourish. Jennifer Preece posits that etiquette, empathy and trust in communities of practice can be developed by understanding people’s needs; representing the community’s purpose clearly; putting minimalist policies in place that can be changed as norms develop; supporting knowledge creation, exchange and storage; supporting communication and socialization online; encouraging empathy by enabling participants to recognize each other and their similarities; supporting trust by ensuring that identity is revealed and past behavior is tracked.

In the paper Learning with Semantic Wikis, Sebastian Schaffert and his colleagues lists the benefits of semantic wikis in the learning process. First, they argue that semantic annotations lead to reflection about knowledge. For instance, the student needs to reflect on the content while reorganizing the wiki material. In fact, the teacher can assess the student’s progress by analyzing the change history. Second, semantic Wikis enable the teacher and students to share formal models, and build of a common model collaboratively. Finally, reasoning and inference capabilities of Semantic Web technologies can lead to discovery of knowledge without active user search. In the paper Using a Semantic Wiki in Communities of Practice, Adil El Ghali and his colleagues articulate the advantages of adding semantics to wikis like semantic search and navigation, a more intuitive interface, intelligent awareness, tagging, folksonomy management, linking CoP content to external resources, etc.

The development of Communities of Practice is the charter of Army Knowledge Online. Here is a paper and related presentation that articulates the thrust in DoD. We are in the process of putting these ideas into practice in our Semantic Wiki for Complex Operations project.

Tags: ,
Posted in Research Brief | 1 Comment »

Milcord awarded R&D contract under ONR HSCB program to develop Semantic Wiki for Complex Operations Community

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Milcord, LLC. – WALTHAM, MA – Milcord LLC announced a multi-year award under DoD’s Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) Modeling Program to develop a semantic wiki for the Complex Operations community.  The HYKNOCO (Hybrid Knowledge Management framework for Complex Operations) project is funded by the Office of Naval Research under the HSCB Modeling Program.  Milcord is leading a team consisting of the Naval Postgraduate School, University of Maryland, University of California – Davis, and IAVO.

About Milcord: Since 2003 Milcord has been delivering knowledge management technologies and solutions for a range of applications including cyber defense, human and social modeling, geospatial intelligence, and information management. Milcord’s federal customers include Air Force Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Labs, Army Geospatial Center, Office of Secretary of Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA.  For more information see www.milcord.com.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Press Release | No Comments »