UC: BT01 - Intelligence Analysis Use Case

BT01 - Intelligence Analysis Use Case

Sally is focusing her doctoral studies on the application of Social Network
theory to perform an analysis of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) in an
attempt to predict the success of movies and the likelihood of collaboration
between directors and actors.   This is an interesting problem not only for
Hollywood pizzazz, but also because it is similar to a counter-terrorism
problem faced by the Intelligence Community today.

Based on her research on social networks, Sally is later hired by an agency
in the Intelligence Community.  However, Sally finds that things are a
little more complicated in the Intelligence Community.  First, there are
multiple organizations and each maintains their own Intelligence Community
databases (ICDB).  Like the IMDB, these ICDBs provide an extensible set of
relationships (is-member-of, suspected-role-in, also-known-as,
communication-with, reported-by, first-identified-by) that describe and
organize an universe of entities (individuals, terrorist cells, nations,
political aims, terrorist events, financing sources, dates, etc.)  However,
each ICDB may impose a different organizational scheme on both the
relationship types and the entities, and may use a different identifier for
each relationship and entity.  Also, the rules and procedures for
intelligence collection also differ from organization to organization.  As a
consequence, the pragmatic meaning of the identified relationships and
entities may differ in subtle collection-specific ways, leading to
idiosyncratic issues when determining how an agent chooses to fuse these
collections for a specific purpose.

Other real world complications include: having multiple agents inside each
organization that need to be able to update their ICDB; the pedigree of the
information is critical; and agents in each organization need to be able to
perform analysis on a fused view of the information base - as constrained by
legal and procedural boundaries on what may be shared with whom and under
what circumstances. 

The different ICDBs have evolved organically as internal applied R&D
efforts.  However, the Intelligence Community understands that these
idiosyncratic solutions may be dated by recent developments in Semantic Web
technologies and Sally is selected as part of a committee evaluating
commercial "semantic web servers" for use as part of an ICDB solution.
Ideally, a semantic web server would be able to speak and accept any of a
number of semantic markup languages, and could be queried using any of a
number of query languages.  Further, Sally understands that an Intelligence
Community semantic web server will contain 10E9 or more assertions - and a
semantic web server must be able to process those requests efficiently.  In
an effort to make the information more useful while respecting the legal and
procedural constraints on information sharing, Sally has been charged with
exploring how semantic web servers can support privacy technologies, such as
one-way hashes for information that can identify subjects, integrate with
single-sign on architectures to facilitate constrained federated information
views, maintain provenance information, and expose answers to simple yes/no
questions without having to expose evidence and provenance on which those
answers are based that could damage operators in the field or otherwise
violate legal or procedural barriers on information sharing.

-bryan

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 07:51:58 UTC