--In an asymmetric environment, intelligence depends very much on a growing amount of unstructured human-based information in physical and social contexts. Automated support for extraction of information from these unstructured sources is essential. In order to be able to further process this extracted information, it has to be stored in a structured way, keeping its semantic content and thereby providing the basis for automatic and interactive use. As the information to be taken into account very soon exceeds human ability to comprehensively perform this kind of task, methods for the support of context-based link analysis are required. A thorough generation of all hypotheses, taking into account all alternatives that can be deduced from the available information, is not feasible. Methods are needed to cope with imperfection and to comprehensively generate hypotheses for further reasoning and deduction.

--Joachim Biermann is a Senior Scientist with FGAN-FKIE, the Research Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics of the German Defence Research Establishment. He leads a group working in the area of data and information fusion for defence and security and has been involved in different national and international projects on knowledge-based exploitation and fusion of military information in the context of intelligence processing. Currently he is the chairman of the NATO RTO Task Group on Information Fusion in Asymmetric Operations (IST-065/RTG-028).

--Dr. John Lavery is a Senior Program Manager in the Mathematics Division of the Army Research Office, where he manages a program in information fusion, urban modelling and related areas and carries out research on urban modelling. Dr. Lavery currently leads various U.S. Army initiatives in fusion, including fusion of hard (physics-based) and soft (human, informational) data.