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Tools of the trade

By Deborah Radcliff

April 1, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - When a humanitarian organization sets its sights on a new locale, chances are that it will call the seven-person open-source intelligence team at Northrop Grumman Corp. in Los Angeles to get the lowdown on the region's infrastructure -- including feedback on airports, water supplies and the availability of tents and medicine, for example.

Northrop got into the business of open-source intelligence about five years ago and is pushing to expand the service to the business community.

But there's too much information out there to track down, says Barry Justice, director of the open-source unit at Northrop. The problem is analyzing all of that information for relevancy and trends. The Northrop team turns to a handful of text and data analysis tools that shorten this task. Some of Justice's favorites include the following:

TextAnalyst: This product from Bloomington, Ind.-based Megaputer Intelligence Inc. searches documents for phrases and keywords and creates an abstract of the document by weighing repeat words and strings.

DataScope: This graphic visualization tool from Singapore-based Cygron groups and categorizes data for easier viewing.

ThemescapeTM: Developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., this tool is currently available only to former and current government agents. It also correlates and grids documents according to similarity.

"When we put all these tools together, we call it our decision-support lab," Justice says. "They help us analyze the information quicker and display it in an easy-to-read format."

Not all data analysis tools are up to the task, however, says Leonard Fuld, managing partner at Fuld & Co., a competitive intelligence firm in Cambridge, Mass. In February, Fuld published his annual competitive intelligence software report, which includes a review of the top 13 analysis tools on the market.

"We found some interesting improvements in these tools over the last year," says Fuld. "It just goes to show that old intelligence dogs can learn new technical tricks."

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