Technology for Enhancing National Security

National security has received unprecedented attention from academics, industrial leaders and the general public since September 11, 2001. The resulting worrying situation calls for solutions from a variety of promising areas, such as database technology. Additionally, traditional data management technologies (e.g., query processing and transaction management), data processing technologies (e.g., schema integration , data quality, name entity recognition and metadata management) and data management applications (e.g., data mining) must all be re-evaluated in the context of national security. Furthermore, the ability to track and monitor people raises serious issues of security and privacy. In this special issue, six papers contributed by researchers from academia, industry and government highlight the progress made in these and other areas of concern, focusing on the challenges and opportunities for database technology in national security applications. The first paper, " On U.S. Homeland Security and Database Technology, " is by Won Kim. Kim reviews the state-of-the-art and provides a future vision for applying database technology to national security applications. He highlights the difficulties of tracking terrorist activities and examines how databases and database technology, including database federation, metadata management and fuzzy querying, can be made more effective in the war against terror. He also discusses relevant technologies , database-related and otherwise, that can help sharpen and fine-tune homeland security efforts. The accuracy of terrorist-related data and information has a profound impact on intelligence agencies. The stakes of false positives and false negatives in tracing terrorists are very high. One way to reduce the chances of misjudgment is to improve data quality. National security poses special challenges to managing information quality, due to the broad coverage of information types, diverse information sources, data collected with incompatible technologies from different agencies, widely distributed information collection processes involving humans, obfuscated data to protect privacy, and so on. The second paper, " Information Quality: Critical Ingredient for National Security, " is by Larry P. En-glish. English argues that systematic and rigorous procedures and technologies must be in place to ensure information quality in data collection, access, aggregation and usage. The procedures and technologies include standardizing the definition for data and information required for sharing across national security agencies, designing flex