Filtering, Fusion and Dynamic Information Presentation: Towards a General Information Firewall

Abstract

Intelligence analysts are flooded with massive amounts of data from a multitude of sources and in many formats. From this raw data they attempt to gain insight that will provide decision makers with the right information at the right time. Data quality varies from very high quality data generated by reputable sources to misleading and very low quality data generated by malicious entities. Disparate organizations and databases, global collection networks and international language differences further hamper the analyst’s job. We present a web based information firewall to help counter these problems. It allows analysts to collaboratively customize web content by the creation and sharing of dynamic knowledge-based user interfaces that greatly improve data quality, and hence analyst effectiveness, through filtering, fusion and dynamic transformation techniques. Our results indicate that this approach is not only effective, but will scale to support large entities within the Intelligence Community.