William Wright

The Sandbox for analysis: concepts and methods

The Sandbox is a flexible and expressive thinking environment that supports both ad-hoc and more formal analytical tasks. It is the evidence marshalling and sense-making component for the analytical software environment called nSpace. This paper presents innovative Sandbox human information interaction capabilities and the rationale underlying them including direct observations of analysis work as well as structured interviews. Key capabilities for the Sandbox include put-this-there cognition, automatic process model templates, gestures for the fluid expression of thought, assertions with evidence and scalability mechanisms to support larger analysis tasks. The Sandbox integrates advanced computational linguistic functions using a Web Services interface and protocol. An independent third party evaluation experiment with the Sandbox has been completed. The experiment showed that analyst subjects using the Sandbox did higher quality analysis in less time than with standard tools. Usability test results indicated the analysts became proficient in using the Sandbox with three hours of training.

Avian Flu Case Study with nSpace and GeoTime

GeoTime and nSpace are new analysis tools that provide innovative visual analytic capabilities. This paper uses an epidemiology analysis scenario to illustrate and discuss these new investigative methods and techniques. In addition, this case study is an exploration and demonstration of the analytical synergy achieved by combining GeoTimes geo-temporal analysis capabilities, with the rapid information triage, scanning and sense-making provided by nSpace. A fictional analyst works through the scenario from the initial brainstorming through to a final collaboration and report. With the efficient knowledge acquisition and insights into large amounts of documents, there is more time for the analyst to reason about the problem and imagine ways to mitigate threats. The use of both nSpace and GeoTime initiated a synergistic exchange of ideas, where hypotheses generated in either software tool could be cross-referenced, refuted, and supported by the other tool

nCompass Service Oriented Architecture for Tacit Collaboration Services

nCompass is a flexible, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to support the research and deployment of advanced tacit collaboration technology services for analysts. nCompass allows a significantly larger number of individual analytic capabilities, applications and services to be integrated together quickly and effectively. Service integration results are described from several computational tacit collaboration experiments conducted with open source intelligence analysts working with open source data. Key to nCompass is the technical framework and unique analytic event logging schema that supports context sharing across diverse applications and services. It is by combining the analyst with shared context across multiple advanced computational capabilities in a system of systems that a breakthrough in collaborative open source analysis can be achieved. This paper introduces the nCompass framework and integration platform, describes key nCompass core services, and provides results on functional synergies achieved through technology service integration with nCompass.