ODNI Describes Emerging Tools for Data Fusion, Analysis
Several intelligence community initiatives to develop improved tools for data search, analysis and fusion were described in the latest report to Congress (pdf) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on data mining.
A new program called DataSphere is intended “to aid in the discovery of unknown terrorism relationships and the identification of previously undetected terrorist and terrorism information” through analysis of communication networks and travel patterns.
A continuing program called Catalyst seems to be a glorified search engine that “will enable data fusion/analytic programs to share disparate repositories with each other, to disambiguate and cross-correlate the different agencies’ holdings, and to discover and visualize relationship/network links, geospatial patterns, temporal patterns and related correlations.”
Although these and other initiatives do not yet constitute or engage in “data mining,” they were described in the new report “in the interest of transparency,” ODNI said. See “2010 Data Mining Report,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, April 2011.
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