Saturday, July 01, 2006

Another $450,000 down the drain

The Information Forensics and Process Intregration research program has been launched as part of the Transformation program of the Department of Defense. One of the first research programs is entitled "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information".

This study will be conducted using an analytical technique dubbed RSTC by the firm, Versatile Information Systems, hired to do the work. And what does RSTC stand for? R - relevance, S - specificity, T - timeliness, C - credibility. Aren't there sites, such as Truth Laid Bear, that already analyze blogs for RST? How credibility will be analyzed is not discussed other than to define it as "the amount of trust you have in an information source".

For this groundbreaking work, we, the taxpayers, will spend $450,000 and we will give the researchers three years to finish. Wouldn't it make more sense to hire the people who have already been working in this area? It would be cheaper and take less time, but I'm not sure that's one of the goals of the Defense Department's Trasformation efforts.

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