Warning Analysis for the Information Age - Higgins Counterterrorism ...

to extract all the entities or a method to describe all the possible types ofinteractions between them, this is impossible.A simple way of organizing data used by historians and other researchers—and indeed sometimes 8th graders—to solve this problem is the tried-and-true 3”by 5” index card (3x5 card). After the relevant documents are collected, theresearcher uses the Table of Contents or Index to find and read the relevant sections—orsometimes just reads the entire document if the interactions have notbeen well defined—and writes down individual interactions as single sentenceson 3x5 note cards (along with bibliographic reference data). Once all the currentrelevant documents are parsed this way, all the 3x5 cards are re-organized to followthreads of interactions that tell a story. Different cards arranged differentways could tell many stories off the same 3x5 card deck. The historian can thentell the story for the project at hand and save all the cards for later re-analysis.Often by following threads through the 3x5 card deck, “novel” relationships willemerge that allow telling unexpected stories.In essence, relational databases are merely electronic 3x5 card decks. Relationaldatabases have the advantage that once the individual interactions areentered, the electronic 3x5 cards can be arranged and re-arranged in many ways.But, both relational databases and 3x5 card decks are limited; it does not matterhow elaborate the electronic interfaces and tools or how big and ornate the 3x5card box, the ability to mine new data depends on the quality and number of“cards” that comprise the dataset.IC Challenge: How can we rapidly build the huge relational datasets requiredfor the wide range of problems needed to be analyzed by the IC? How may thehistorian or researcher be replaced by an electronic tool that can effectivelyread and understand language well enough to build an effective electronic “3x5card” file?The major problem in using the massive quantities available to the Communityhas less to do with the sheer magnitude of the data than the lack of historians tobuild a baseline of knowledge and the lack of librarians and curators to organizeand tag the data for easy retrieval. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that theIntelligence Community is unlikely to hire human historians, librarians and curatorsto support analysts in the way that other information-dependent organizationssupport their researchers. This means that we must develop methods tobypass the need for historians, librarians and curators by automating those functions,that is, developing computer tools for data archiving and retrieval.51