Pattern recognition projects

There was another indication of a growing federal government interest in technologies for recognizing terror threat-related patterns and relationships in open information sources (such as newspapers, magazines, journals, and public records).

Earlier this month, this blog featured a post on a newly released Intelligence Analysis solutions package from LexisNexis. One of its components ("Open Source Analysis") was designed to help understand national security threats by identifying operational signatures within disparate, multi-sourced data sets.

Last month, the Homeland Security Department awarded a $3 million grant to a consortium of industry and academic research labs led by Rutgers University's Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). As stated in the press release,

"This group will develop computing technologies that find patterns and relationships in data, such as news stories, open-source web logs, and other accessible information, to quickly identify emerging indicators of possible terrorist activity, and rate the consistency and reliability of the sources. Such information could give officials more lead time to investigate and potentially thwart terrorist plans."

Dr. Fred C. Roberts, director of the DIMACS, noted that two key challenges involved in this project are
(1)The massive amount of information to be processed, and
(2)The speed at which both this information and its sources change.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Technology, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines

NEWS: New government portal

Convera Corporation (a Vienna, VA-based provider of search technologies) has announced a release of a free government search portal named "Govmine". The tool (currently in a beta-version) became a third player in the government portal market following FirstGov (powered by Microsoft's MSN Search and Vivisimo's Clusty) and Google's U.S. Government Search. It is designed to serve the needs of government knowledge workers (unlike FirstGov, for example, which caters to citizens).

Govmine uses Convera's platform already installed in many federal agencies. As FCW notes, Govmine's results are based on pattern recognition and semantic technology (in contrast to Google's ranking system, which analyses links among Web sites to determine an individual page's value).

FCW also points out (quoting Kurt Gastrock, Convera's chief operating officer) that Convera has experience with efficiently categorizing search results for government professionals. For example, an employee searching for "serotonin" would see the results categorized in the following order:

-- Diseases and pathological conditions (25,547 results)
-- Treatment (21,618 Results)
-- Symptoms (2,612 Results)
-- Side effects (9,693 results)
-- Drug toxicity (864 results)
-- Food and drug recalls (9 results)

One question here is how this new offering will work with the agencies' existing investments in Convera products - that is, is it intended to compliment or substitute these investments in any way?

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines, Information Technology

NEWS: "Single sign-on" service for Homeland Security Department

On August 7, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a Request for Information (RFI) for industry solutions that can provide single sign-on (SSO) access to its online services in order to improve the DHS strategic information-sharing capability - that is, "getting the right information to the right people without delay".

As noted in the accompanying Statement of Work (SOW) (MS Word document), one specific aspect of this project is defining "he types of information the SSO service needs in order to make appropriate decisions about which individuals should be given access to what information under which circumstances, based on applicable law, policy and operational need. In other words, what attributes do we need to know of a person requesting access to a DHS information resource?"

In particular, the following factors can potentially be used to determine attributes of a highest-priority person (according to the SOW):

-- Employing organizations, sub-entities, work roles, etc.;
-- Characteristics of the user populations currently served by the DHS information services;
-- Type and sensitivity of information provided to users;
-- "Ideal" user populations (that is, all those whose mission could be better or more easily achieved by access to the information, whether or not currently accessing the information service);
-- Legally authorized purposes of the users (that is, permitted "routine uses" declared for privacy information);
-- Other limitations on distribution of the information,(for example, "memorandum-of-understanding" restrictions linked to information obtained from other agencies); and
-- Attributes currently being used to govern access to the information resources.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Information Systems, Security, Information Security, Information Sharing

NEWS: Future Digital System contract awarded

On August 4, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) announced that Harris Corporation of Melbourne, Fla. was selected as the Master Integrator for the project to build the GPO's Future Digital System (FDSys).

As stated in one of the earlier requirements documents, the FDSys will serve "to ingest, preserve and provide access to electronic content from all three Branches of the U.S. Government". More specifically, the system should be able to support the GPO's content management and content delivery processes by

-- Providing access to descriptions of all types of content preserved by the GPO;
-- Accepting/ingesting content in a variety of complex formats;
-- Being capable to accommodate future digital formats;
-- Ensuring the authenticity of the content that the GPO preserves;
-- Providing access to the content; and
-- Supporting flexible services for content that the GPO will manage on behalf of other Federal agencies.

The Master Integrator will operate as a general contractor and will work collaboratively with the GPO to identify solutions for the FDSys functions and to integrate various components, technology, and applications.

Harris Corporation develops communications products for government and commercial customers worldwide. Among these products are microwave, satellite, and other wireless network transmission equipment, air traffic control systems, mobile radio systems, and digital network broadcasting and management systems. The company's largest customer is the U.S. Federal Government.

As part of their bidding strategy, Harris provided the GPO with several scenarios for how the latter could use commercially available technologies to accomplish its objective. Interestingly, the scenarios were based on the Harris' previous experience with building a prototype of the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archive - a project, for which the company was subsequently "beaten out" by Lockheed Martin.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Document Management, Information Technology

Hidden dangers of RSS

An August 3rd article from GCN features remarks made by Robert Auger, Security Engineer with Atlanta-based SPI Dynamics, on security risks posed by RSS technology.

Such risks may occur, for example, when an RSS feed picks up comments left by readers on the web-site the feed is associated with: the readers may include malicious code in their posts post expecting those comments to get forwarded. The problem is exacerbated with news aggregation software (NewsGator, Google Reader, etc.) that brings together multiple feeds.

One factor behind these risks is that although data delivered by RSS feeds originates remotely, many RSS clients display the data as if it were trusted local material.

A critical defense mechanism here can be input validation - that is, readers need to "sanitize" content before it is displayed. As Auger notes,

"Users could disable JavaScript on some client software and browsers, but there are some things you can do with HTML, so just disabling scripting is not enough."

Click here to view the article.

Technorati tags: Information Management, Information Technology, IT Security, RSS

LexisNexis and intelligence community

LexisNexis U.S., one of the leading providers of information management services, has recently announced a release of "Intelligence Analysis" - a solutions package designed to help analysts from intelligence and national security communities "pinpoint and identify relevant information contained within massive volumes of disparate data".

The capabilities offered in this package include:

-- "Open Source Analysis" - helping to understand national security threats by identifying operational signatures within disparate, multi-sourced data sets such as news articles, transcripts, scientific journals, public records and Web-based content;

-- "Maritime Domain Awareness" - helping to spot links between cargo, containers, businesses, crews and vessels "to enable risk assessment for effective interdiction and mitigation of threats before they reach U.S. shores"; and

-- "All-source analysis" - enabling to enrich classified data sets with information from open sources (such as news articles); in other words, analysts will be able to fuse data from multiple sources - both structured and unstructured.

This last capability provides an excellent federal agency example of
(1) having a Business Intelligence tool work in conjunction with a search engine (something discussed in an earlier post) - that is, returning results of a query executed over both structured and unstructured data; and
(2) presenting search results from both classified and unclassified data sources.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Technology, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines