Interpreting and integrating mismatched data on the fly

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This project is concerned with the problem of interpreting information and requests which are received during communication: for example, during an emergency response event. If the data sources of the sender of the information/request and the data source of the receiver are not fully compatible (which is highly likely even within an organisation and almost certain between different organisations) then the received information or request will not be understood by the receiver. Our matching system is designed to explore the receiver's data source to find one or more terms which appear to be similar to the received term, in order to allow the receiver to interpret this term with respect to its own data. The implications of this match (for example, that a more general term is being used, that certain attributes of a term are being ignored or introduced, and so on) are explained to a user representing the receiver organisation, who can then approve the proposed match, and interaction will proceed as if the two different terms were equivalent.The matching system is local to every participant that wishes to make use of it and so it is only able to access the data of the organisation which is using it. This therefore avoids privacy and security issues by ensuring that only data that has been approved for sharing in the current context can be accessed by others.The aims of the project are:- to investigate the kinds of mismatches that have been encountered in real emergency response scenarios and within real data sources, which will be provided by our collaborators (in Dstl, the Met Office, Scottish Resilience and Strathclyde FireRscue).- to implement a system which will apply techniques based on existing matching techniques to these data sources, to enable appropriate interpretation of unknown data, and to provide feedback to users so that they can approve these matches (or in situations where the consequences of errors is low, these can proceed automatically without user approval).- to evaluate the system against real data, with feedback from expert users as to how useful and appropriate the suggested matches are.This project will be exploratory and is designed to evaluate the potential of the approach. There are several factors which should be addressed before the system is ready to be used in the field that are outside the scope of this project, specifically: - Carry out further analysis of data, and of mismatches that have actually occurred in emergency response situations. Performing this will be a key feature of this project, but this can only be an initial study; - Design and implement new matching techniques to address any possible mismatches which are not addressed by those currently implemented. Depending on the complexity of the data, it is not anticipated that it will be possible to cover every possible mismatch within this project; - Provide a carefully designed web interface for user interaction with the system. This would require specialist design advice and will not be attempted during the project; instead, a simple interface will be provided.The key output of this project will be an understanding of the potential of this approach, based on the evaluation of the implementation, and a roadmap for how to develop this prototype work into a system which can be used in the field.