A Knowledge Base for Dependability and Security Research

Research on computer system resilience, indeed on dependability and security generally, suffers from fragmentation into numerous partly-overlapping communities, and inconsistencies in terminology. As a partial response to this situation, we report on the development and use of a Resilience Knowledge Base (RKB) which currently contains over 60 million information items drawn from publication repositories and funding agencies worldwide. We describe the RKB technology, showing how it can support exploration of the research space using semantic web techniques to ameliorate difficulties caused by differences in terminology. We discuss the potential for the RKB to support Resilience-Explicit Computing, in which the decision to select a tool or configure a component from among alternatives is supported using metadata-based mechanism descriptions. The RKB Explorer can identify indirect but potentially significant inter-relationships not only between people,between these and information about tools, components and training materials