ARLINGTON, Va., April 24 -- Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a leading systems, solutions and technical services company, is leading a consortium that is building a dynamic Semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (SSOA) solution. The initial prototype is being demonstrated at the SAIC booth at the Defense Intelligence Agency CIO-sponsored Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS) Worldwide 2007 conference .

"The demand for robust systems that allow analysts to interact with information technology in an intuitive, user-centric manner and focus on higher-order reasoning tasks led us to develop the SSOA solution," said Sam Chance, senior enterprise architect for SAIC, "and our demonstration at DoDIIS proves that SSOA is not just talk, but a real world capability demonstrable today."

SAIC's SSOA is:

• Semantics-based. Correlating events from multiple disparate sources, SSOA provides a leading edge quality of insight and awareness to humans.

• Easy to use, for analysts and developers alike. Applications are composed of loosely coupled, re-usable components, which are assembled as form-based or graphical workflows.

• Dynamic, autonomic and cost-effective. Built atop a recovery-oriented service fabric, SSOA is self-assembling, self-healing, self-managing, self-scaling and self-auditing. It operates across commercially available commodity hardware.

• Event-driven. SSOA provides users full access and awareness into not only changes in relevant data, but changes in business services, thus enabling robust, adaptive processes and “persistent awareness.”

• Standards-based. Leveraging a distributed OSGi and Service Component Architecture (SCA) standards-based framework, the Infiniflow Enterprise Service Fabric.
  

 
DoDIIS Demo Use Cases

Two use case demonstrations are being featured by SAIC: Emergency Response and Data Fusion. For the Emergency Response application, data is retrieved from a wide variety of sources (e.g., Web sites, mail lists, RSS, RDB, e-mail, simulated message traffic, etc.) and written to a persistent store as semi-structured data. Persistent stores are monitored by agents and by analysts via a service-driven user interface. Collected data are manipulated by agents and assimilated by reasoning services. The primary output of the Emergency Response use case is a recommended response plan. Rapid and agile “Event-to-Response” capabilities are critical to successfully manage emergent situations, and SSOA delivers this need adaptively and intuitively.

Effective analysis and decision making demand rapid processing of relevant information based on real-world events. The Data Fusion use case demonstrates rapid analysis through data reduction and data integration. Unstructured data is retrieved from a variety of unstructured data sources (e.g., Web sites, mail lists, etc.) and Essential Elements of Information (EEI) from each data source are extracted by robots, and represented as semi-structured data, and written to a persistent store which is monitored by agents. Upon a particular combination of events, the semi-structured data is processed into highly structured data and input into the knowledge base. The knowledge base is responsible for providing an integrated view of the structured data, and depending upon the type of event, agents may modify the robots’ behaviors, such as directing robots to acquire new information. An analyst interacts with enriched contextual information which forms the basis for intuitive, effective conclusions and sound decision making. Analysts may share contexts or connect to other contexts, thus creating a larger body of corporate knowledge.

The SSOA Consortium

Six organizations and independent software vendors are involved with the SSOA Consortium in addition to SAIC: Agent Logic, Dynamics Research Corp., Kapow Technologies, Paremus, Siderean Software and SoftPro Technologies.

"Semantic SOA is the future," said Chance. "People are getting excited about Web 2.0 today; and SAIC and our team mates are demonstrating our technology leadership position by delivering the next-generation of semantic- based systems that could form the basis for what will be described as Web 3.0."

About SAIC

SAIC is a leading provider of scientific, engineering, systems integration and technical services and solutions to all branches of the U.S. military, agencies of the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. Government civil agencies, as well as to customers in selected commercial markets. With more than 44,000 employees in over 150 cities worldwide, SAIC engineers and scientists solve complex technical challenges requiring innovative solutions for customers’ mission-critical functions. SAIC had annual revenues of $8.3 billion for its fiscal year ended Jan. 31.

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Source: SAIC