Open Source Information Geospatial Overlay (OSIGO)

The objective of this project is to develop a capability to automatically link news articles to satellite imagery and then to display summaries of the linked articles. In Phase I of this effort, we developed an initial approach to automatically link news articles to geographic locations and then cluster and summarize the linked articles. In our experimental evaluation, we showed that articles could be linked with high precision and moderate recall. We also demonstrated the feasibility of automatically clustering the articles into topics and generating both single-line summaries as well as longer summaries. In Phase II of this effort we plan to flesh out the techniques into a fully-functional system, called GeoXRay. In particular, we will develop automatic techniques to rapidly build the required geospatial knowledgebase, which allows the system to link articles to locations outside of the US. We will also improve the linking techniques to improve the recall of the document linking while maintaining the high-level of precision that we achieved in Phase I. Finally, we will improve the techniques for automatic clustering and summarization of the news articles linked to a location so that an analyst can quickly determine which articles are likely to contain relevant information.