Framework of Knowledge-Based System for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations Using Data Mining Technique

This paper presents the framework of “Knowledge-Based System” to assist the Malaysian United Nations Military Observers (UNMO) in conducting the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations at the deployment country. Further, a suitable data mining technique (e.g. clustering or association rule mining) will be applied to extract interesting and beneficial knowledge including hidden patterns from various sources related to the peacekeeping mission that is required by UNMO. The proposed system will be integrated into the rugged tablet or any pervasive equipment that is used for the peacekeeping operations. Here, the knowledge-based system can be used to assist the UNMO in decision-making when facing all possible scenarios while conducting the peacekeeping operations.

I. Introduction

This United Nations Peacekeeping began in 1948 when the Security Council authorized the deployment of United Nations (UN) military observers to the Middle East [22]. The mission was to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Since then, hundreds peacekeeping operations have been deployed by the UN until now. Over the years, thousands of military personnel, as well as UN police and other civilians from more than 120 countries have participated in UN peacekeeping operations [22]. In the early years UN Peacekeeping was primarily limited to maintaining ceasefires and stabilizing situations on the ground, providing crucial support for political efforts to resolve conflict by peaceful means. Those missions consisted of unarmed military observers and lightly armed troops with primarily monitoring, reporting and confidence-building roles. Since the task of the military personnel or military observer (MILOB) especially the Malaysian United Nations Military Observers (UNMO) is to be the mediator and stabilize conflict situations and difficult situations among the local community, therefore, the knowledge including important information and in depth understanding of the mission are vital to them. However, this information is not easy to gather due to: •

Information gathered by the UNMO during patrolling and other related resources to support the mission are not properly stored in a database. Further, supporting documents might contain hidden interesting knowledge which is not transparent where a technique to extract the knowledge is required.

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According to the preliminary study, no research has been conducted in order to extract the knowledge of the peacekeeping mission in systematic way especially for the use of the UNMO.

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Further, no existing tool, software, or application in particular that apply data mining technique is developed to assist the Malaysian UNMO to easily extract the knowledge of the mission (i.e. previous and current conflicts and incidents that already happened, general historical background of the mission, and many others).