Integrated Collaboration Environment for Sense-making (ICES)

Intelligence analysis is a cognitively intensive process that requires analysts to implement various strategies to mine and filter immense data sets, identify higher-level knowledge based on collected evidence, understand the implications of that accumulating knowledge, and defend selected explanations against all others – collectively referred to as the sense-making loop. While many computational tools have been developed to support data analysis in the intelligence domain, these tools tend to address only parts of the sense-making loop, and generally do not support interoperability within a full suite of analysis tools. The result is a range of “stovepipe” systems that do not support the analyst in fluidly managing the analysis process. Furthermore, such stovepipe systems do not support collaborative analysis through sharing of intelligence artifacts across team members. We propose to address these problems through the design of an Integrated Collaboration Environment for Sense-making (ICES), composed of: 1) a Visual Analytics Module providing each analyst with a suite of interactive tools targeted to specific tasks within the sense-making loop; and 2) the Collaboration Workspace Module enabling the sharing of information between ICES users in a fully integrated shared workspace supporting the execution of the collaborative sense-making loop among distributed intelligence analysts.