Reading a white paper on an integration solution from Thetus Corporation (on its Savanna product line) when I encountered:
Savanna supports the core architectural premise that the integration of external services and components is an essential element of any enterprise platform by providing out-of-the-box integrations with many of the technologies and programs already in use in the DI2E framework. These investments include existing programs, such as: the Intelligence Community Data Layer (ICDL), OPTIC (force protection application), WATCHDOG (Terrorist Watchlist 2.0), SERENGETI (AFRICOM socio-cultural analysis), SCAN-R (EUCOM deep futures analysis); and, in the future: TAC (tripwire search and analysis), and HSCB-funded modeling capabilities, including Signature Analyst and others. To further make use of existing external services and components, the proposed solution includes integration points for commercial and opensource software, including: SOLR (indexing), Open Sextant (geotagging), Apache OpenNLP (entity extraction), R (statistical analysis), ESRI (geo-processing), OpenSGI GeoCache (geospatial data), i2 Analyst’s Notebook (charting and analysis) and a variety of structured and unstructured data repositories.
I have to plead ignorance of the “existing program” alphabet soup but I am familiar with several of the open source packages.
I am not sure what an “integration point” for an unknown future use of any of those packages would look like. Do you? Their output can be used by any program but that hardly qualifies the other program as having an “integration point.”
I am sensitive to the use of “integration” because to me it means there is some basis for integration. So a user having integrated data once, can re-use and possibly enhance the basis for integration of data with other data. (We call that “merging” in topic map land.)
Integration and even reuse is mentioned: “The Savanna architecture prevents creating a set of comparable reuse issues at the enterprise scale by providing a set of interconnected and flexible models that articulate how analysis assets are sourced and created and how they are used by the community.” (page 16)
But not in enough detail to really evaluate the basis for re-use of data, data structures, enrichment of the same, etc.
Looked around for an SDK or such but came up empty.
Point of amusement:
It’s official, we’re debuting our newest release of Savanna at DoDIIS (March 21, 2012) (Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems Worldwide Conference (DoDIIS))
The next blog entry by date?
Happy Peaceful Birthday to the Peace Corps (March 1, 2012)
I would appreciate hearing from anyone with information or stories to tell about how Savanna works in practice.
In particular I am interested in whether two distinct Savanna installations can share information in a blind interchange? That should be the test of re-use of information by another installation.
Moreover, do I have to convert data between formats or can data structures themselves be entities with properties?
PS: I am not overly impressed with the use of OWL for modeling in Savanna. The experience with “big data” has shown that starting with data first leads to different, perhaps more useful models than the other way around.
Premature modeling with OWL will result in models that are “useful” in meeting the expectations of the creating analyst. That may not be the criteria of “usefulness” that is required.