RiverGlass
January 2nd, 2008I bet my nga.mil reader will click the link, and all the other spooks who finally started masking their IPs.
Via: RiverGlass:
Keeping pace with new data has emerged as the critical issue facing government intelligence operations. The variety and volume of incoming data and the responsibility to respond appropriately now more than exceeds the volume of archived records to consult during an investigation. Analysts are simply unable to effectively monitor this massive influx of data. Tools that continuously analyze and automatically connect incoming data to open investigations have become a necessity for intelligence-led policing.
NSA are encountering problems with the flood of information that people [in the outside world] won’t see for an [IT] generation or two, we’ve seen the future and the problems of a ‘tidal wave’ of data.
– Senior official, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
RiverGlass has responded to this critical national security issue by applying its sophisticated machine learning techniques for analyzing streams of disparate data to the information overload problems facing intel analysts today. RiverGlass and the Statewide Terrorism Intelligence Center (STIC) of the Illinois State Police have jointly developed a suite of tools tailored to the specific needs of analysts working in a fusion center environment. Along with unique visualizations and analytics, this collaboration has produced an ontology of more than 85,000 terms – to both enhance and simplify analytical results – with built-in expert knowledge of STIC analysts. This RiverGlass public safety ontology contains data definitions of the entities important to a fully-compliant extension of the Global Justice XML standard.
The end result is an analytics solution specifically geared toward fusion centers and other government intelligence agencies, enabling them to gain and maintain a complete intelligence picture, 24/7.
RiverGlass Enables Government & Intelligence to:
Find relevant entities contained within the data. By mapping query results into distinct categories, RiverGlass organizes and presents information according to these real-world concepts. Analysts view data in terms of the subjects of an investigation – people, methods, places, targets and more – and can also quickly find and access documents that show relationships across different subjects.
Automatically seek out and monitor websites that relate to criminal investigations or other intel needs. Information posted to the Internet from diverse sources like CNN, MSNBC, Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and Department of Justice, as well as sites that post threatening or criminal content is critical to effective data analysis. The Web, however, is expanding at an exponential rate and analysts are faced with extreme information overload. RiverGlass tools allow analysts to activate searches that intelligently and continuously scan the web for information relevant to them and their organization. Because of its access to the context of an organization through a customized ontology, RiverGlass tools can more quickly discover where relevant content exists.
Be alerted to meaningful connections in incoming data – enabling true intelligence-led policing. RiverGlass works with government and intelligence agencies to appropriately monitor incoming data and alert analysts as soon as important information becomes available. The alert criteria can be anything from monitoring for simple changes in a suspect profile to sophisticated threat-assessments using statistical and machine learning pattern detection techniques.
Access all data from a single place. Single sign-on federated query allows analysts to quickly access data across databases, file systems, web documents, and services like Westlaw and LexisNexis without juggling multiple applications and login information.
Streamline the consumption of daily intel reports. Although communication between agencies has improved, the resulting volume of text that must be read by analysts on a daily basis – much of it cut-and-paste from other reports – has created a significant burden. RiverGlass develops intuitive visualizations that give an analyst a comprehensive view of the information in a collection of reports without ever being forced to read the same information twice. RiverGlass’ ability to distill information found in periodic intelligence reports, and to identify redundant sections across these reports, is particularly useful.
