The Semantic Web and "What If?"

It's been my understanding that "what-if scenarios" were the domain of spreadsheets. But that was before a team of researchers at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) introduced "risk analysis" and the "Semantic web" into the mix.

ISI's Michael Orosz is leading the team which is developing a tool called Risk Analysis Workbench (RAW), which brings together web resources, information sharing, game theory, and artificial intelligence to the task of gathering and distributing the specific data necessary to perform the tree analyses and other problems of "what-if" risk analysis in a speedy and -- above all -- in a uniform way. Where "what if" comes into play is in how the risk-related questions are framed.

Considering the "risk analysis" part of the equation, it should come as no surprise that the ISI is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and USC's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) to build systems that help policymakers make more consistent and speedier decisions when quantifying risk estimates. The Semantic web -- systematic structuring of database information to make it more accessible over the Internet -- is a major part of the system.

CREATE is an interdisciplinary national research center based at the USC and funded by the DHS. It focuses on risk and economic analysis of the U.S. and comprises a team of experts from across the country, including partnerships with New York University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Center aims to become the world's leading academic program for modeling the risks and vulnerabilities of terrorism, assessing the direct and indirect consequences, gauging their economic impacts, and evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures.

RAW is still in development. The current version is RAW 2.0, which according to Orosz will be distributed in July as an alpha version. As an example problem, the ISI team is now working to integrate into RAW risk analysis resources used in foot-and-mouth disease research being undertaken at the Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense (FAZD), and will be reaching out to the other six centers for subject matter.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:29 PM  Permalink