Vertical information management: A framework to support high-level information requests in the context of autonomous information systems

Vertical information management (VIM) supports decision makers working within various levels of a management hierarchy, seeking information from potentially large, distributed, heterogeneous, and federated information sources. Decision makers are often overwhelmed by the volume of data which may be relevant and collectible, but overly detailed (e.g., from the breadth of open source data). Yet, the collected information must maintain its pedigree to allow access to detail on demand.;VIM structures a top-down query refinement and bottom-up information collection process. We define a VIM framework for specifying, refining, and partitioning a high-level information request which results in the extraction, collection, aggregation, and abstraction of the underlying data. A fundamental assumption of this work is that high-level information requests may involve data that is extracted or derived from underlying information sources, as well as data that is not present in the underlying information sources (referred to as "gaps"). There are components within this framework that work to specify VIM independent of the actual information sources used and the representational characteristics of the data they contain. For a high-level information request to ultimately be issued, a more detailed specification using the representation-dependent components of the framework must be utilized.;Contributions of the VIM framework include: (1) separation of semantics from representation; A high-level information request and the way it is to be constructed from base data may be specified without the burden of the representational detail for the actual underlying data, and without being limited to the data directly stored in the underlying information sources; (2) reusability of high-level information requests against different underlying data sources; (3) provision of an elegant interface between the data integration problem and the information derivation problem; this makes the larger problem of providing decision makers with useful information more understandable; (4) composability allows existing specifications to be pieced together for increasingly complex requests for information, and (5) derivation of defensible data.