GEOINT Open Source Tool

The threats to U.S. national security are rapidly changing and geographically diffuse. It is a fact of life that intelligence analysts are often forced to shift rapidly from one topic to the next. Increasingly, Intelligence Community professionals need to quickly assimilate social, economic, and cultural information about a region. This information is often detailed in open sources. The problem, however, is that intelligence professionals are inundated with massive volumes of open source data without clear understanding of which sources are most relevant or reliable. The Radiance-SAIC team has designed a system architecture which targets technologies designed to increase the effectiveness of OSINT collection for GEOINT products. The proposed system will attempt to direct intelligence analysts to a more decisively relevant set of open source search results and provide quicker access to the most difficult targets. It will also offer tools which help the user make the determination of relevancy faster and with more confidence; Tools which will be designed to automatically geoenable unstructured text and exploit foreign language sources more effectively. Additionally, the system will attempt to improve upon collection and dissemination methodologies by improving the means by which intelligence professionals store, archive, retrieve, and share useful pieces of intelligence. BENEFIT: The proposed Geospatial Open Source Intelligence Tool will have a direct impact on the major intelligence agencies within the DoD as well as the intelligence organizations of the four military services. It has been designed to create efficiencies in the processes of collecting information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. The tool will also have utility within federal and state agencies outside of the DoD where open source information is collected to evaluate and respond to threats on homeland security, disease propagation, energy infrastructure vulnerabilities, fiscal and monetary policies, and illegal narcotics trade. Commercial markets may also find value in data mining capabilities designed to distill information about competitors'' capabilities or executive characteristics or to provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.