Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."
What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.
But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html?pg=1&topic=
http://www.ichnet.org/SAIL_whitepaper_v14.doc
Dealing with the Complexity Challenge Using Inference Engines
The third challenge address the fact that a massive proliferation of heterogeneous components and interfaces makes informal, human reasoning insufficient for developing the interoperability metrics required to make decisions. This was a principal factor in choosing to apply AI inferencing technology toward the S.A.I.L. solution. The complexity of modern enterprise architectures is simply too mentally overwhelming to resolve the capabilities of the final product without either abstraction or filtering. There’s just too many factors to consider at once if one is to evaluate the secondary and tertiary ripple effects of any contact with the architecture. What the person needs is a “contrast” knob, to clarify the picture so that interfaces with lower strength of evidence, and the otherwise non-obvious potential impact of those interfaces will sharpen into view. BlueProphet, as a result of three key merging technologies or collaboration methodologies, was designed to provide this clarity.
Most architectures and technology decisions are vetted and validated within technology, engineering and business groups. These groups provide a collaborative model with formalisms and tools from the old paradigm of software development. S.A.I.L. gives these groups the formalisms and tools for the new paradigm.
http://www.ichnet.org
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has engaged ICH to solicit information from industry on potential enterprise information portal solutions. Through ICH, DHS is seeking industry self-assessments, including information on past implementation experiences that demonstrates vendor ability to meet DHS requirements.
The data provided by industry (vendors, integrators, and users) will be used by the government in the pre-acquisition process. DHS strongly encourages those interested in providing products and/or services for the DHS portal program to complete the self-assessment template and questionnaire.
Completed templates must be emailed to info @ ichnet.org by no later than midnight May 2, 2005 EST.