Homeland Security

   

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The events of September 11 confronted the United States with an entirely new security environment. Terrorists and rogue states are now capable of doing grave damage to the United States on its own soil. This fact has necessitated fundamental changes in our national security posture. As one facet of this ongoing process of thorough review and restructuring, it has become clear that the United States needs better means to handle the vast amounts of unstructured data that contain critical information necessary to defend our homeland. The Government receives unstructured data in many forms: hard-copy documents — even hand-written ones, faxes, e-mails, Web pages, etc. It comes in many different languages, some where the U.S. has very few human analysts skilled in them.

In addition, we must have more effective ways of sharing this information among many U.S. organizations that contribute to homeland security. Defending the homeland requires a seamless, technology-driven environment where analysts have at their fingertips data from a multitude of sources in a structured, usable format. NetOwl technology provides a means of achieving these goals — by making it possible to exploit unstructured data, and making it easily shareable among analysts and across agencies.

NetOwl TextMiner automatically retrieves, analyzes, extracts, summarizes, and visualizes large amounts of unstructured data. It is an integrated analytical platform that provides a large cognitive boost to an analyst's ability to quickly navigate through text data. Using TextMiner, an analyst can search a large document collection by following thematic links rather than simply reading the documents one after the other. TextMiner combines several technologies — search and retrieval, extraction, clustering, summarization, visualization, translation — in a revolutionary way to deliver to the analyst the information he or she needs when they need it, without irrelevant material getting in the way. TextMiner represents a quantum leap over the traditional search engine, where an analyst is frequently swamped by a large amount of irrelevant material that effectively hides the "good stuff" in all too many cases.

NetOwl Extractor goes beyond the extraction of names. Important as names are, an analyst must deal with information where names are partially or completely unknown. Extractor extracts links and events connecting people, organizations, and such items as weapons of mass destruction. Extractor delivers already packaged and understood critical information. The analyst is not only relieved of the burden of scanning large amounts of repetitive information — he or she can be confident that Extractor is on the lookout for entities, links and events of critical importance for them, and will not escape its notice. Based on extensive work with Government analysts, Extractor's set of links and events is the most extensive available. NetOwl Extractor can also handle several foreign languages, including Arabic.

NetOwl Extractor has been deployed extensively through the U.S. Government.

NetOwl InstaLink provides the homeland security analyst with the ability to maintain and update in real time an active situation display. The user who has critical time demands has a highly intuitive visual display of crucial pieces of information that have been automatically extracted from very large quantities of text data. InstaLink also enables extensive collaboration capabilities for teams of analysts working the same or related problems.