Fusion of information from heterogeneous sources

For the Swedish Armed Forces, the nature of current conflicts and today's ITintensive environment make it necessary to be able to handle a large variety of information sources of different types and origins. This heterogeneous information comes in different syntactic formats, is described using different terminologies, uses different ways to express uncertainty, has different accuracies in the metadata, and is of different reliability. Creating situation awareness from such information is challenging, but potentially rewarding. Heterogeneous sources are usually independent and contribute information that complements each other, which can lead to more comprehensive and robust systems. As sensor and communication technology becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, the amount of information that needs to be handled increases. This entails a need for computer-based tools for fusing information from heterogeneous sources. This report gives a general introduction to information fusion, and then focuses on the specific challenges involved in linking and merging information from heterogeneous sources. These challenges are to a large extent related to different aspects of data alignment: how to align information described using different conceptualisations and how to align information using different uncertainty representations. The report also discusses the management of provenance information by means of pedigree metadata. Provenance information is a vital component when assessing the confidence in a fusion result.