Posted on 04/07/2002 8:01:36 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
MITRE Corp. Tracks News (Almost) as it Happens
As CNN and other news sources broadcast news around the clock, MITRE Corp. in Bedford, Massachusetts, captures the footage and maps it.
MITRE is an independent not-for-profit company working in the public interest. It operates federal funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. In May 1998, MITRE was tasked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a project to develop a Geospatial News On Demand Environment, called GeoNODE. GeoNODE helps people navigate and perform analysis on news coverage emanating from CNN broadcast news, print media, archives, and other sources.
According to Rob Hyland, senior technical staff at MITRE Corp., GeoNODE is designed primarily for intelligence analysts who need information on a particular subject. Having a geographic display based largely on ArcView Tracking Analyst, GeoNODE allows analysts to navigate the news both temporally and spatially so that they can see the geographic distribution of news at the time it was reported.
Allen Sears, Program Manager of the Information Technology Office at DARPA, commented, "DARPA is investing in GeoNODE to help military personnel visualize information. Personnel can look at patterns and add value based on their knowledge of common sense issues and the kinds of risks involved."
MITRE has a VCR set up to record the CNN broadcast to an Oracle video server that stores the video footage. The half-hour show is processed by a sophisticated system that indexes and segments the stories. The news-processing component of GeoNODE is provided by a MITRE-sponsored research project called Broadcast News Navigator (BNN). Part of the news processing involves a natural language processing system called Alembic that extracts from each news report the named entities (people, locations, organizations, dates, and currencies), which are then plotted to a map using ArcView GIS. These component technologies have in part benefited from DARPA's prior investments in natural language processing and broadcast news understanding.
Hyland says that GeoNODE has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of time intelligence analysts have to spend watching broadcasts and searching archives. "Since the news is about some place in the world, it makes sense that you might want to use a map to analyze the patterns."
This process operates in near real time. It takes several hours to process the CNN video, so the information is typically available the next day.
To show GeoNODE's capabilities, MITRE has created a demonstration of news coverage about weapons of mass destruction. When analysts conduct a query, they can actually see the number of news agencies that have reported on these weapons, and they get a histogram broken down over time showing how many stories matched their query.
A valuable source of information about weapons of mass destruction is found in the archives of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, called the Monterey Abstracts. This data is collected off HTML pages, stored in Sybase, and plotted to the map just like the CNN information.
GeoNODE can also be used to study geographic patterns over time. For example, in the weapons of mass destruction demo, dots appear on the screen to represent each mention of a term, like a country name or major city name. The dots are scaled to the number of times the term is mentioned, so large dots or clusters show up as major events occur, and then they slowly disappear over time. When looking at 1998 data, analysts will see a clump around February/March, when the United States almost went to war over the Iraqi weapons inspections. A second clump appears in May, when the Pakistan nuclear testing occurred, and the third clump illustrates the embassy bombings in Africa and the U.S. counterstrike.
Hyland says the ArcView Tracking Analyst extension was "a very needed capability" for developing GeoNODE. "ArcView Tracking Analyst is an essential part of the capability we're trying to provide. The ability to visualize this information both spatially and temporally is absolutely essential in understanding news over time."
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