issinc.com/topicbuilder
Datasheet
Your key resource for finding, organizing, and utilizing critical information
Intelligence analysts are challenged daily with reviewing large
amounts of diverse information from multiple sources to find the
facts critical to their commanders’ missions. Topic Builder, an
enterprise search, discovery and analytics application, significantly
reduces these challenges by automatically monitoring all connected
data sources for information relevant to a user’s missions and
presenting that information for rapid analysis and decision making. Find the Needle – Powerful Search and Discovery
Topic Builder enables powerful search and discovery by "shrinking
the haystack” for an analyst—characterizing information of interest
with combinations of keywords, taxonomic synonyms, geographic
names, areas of interest, time constraints and entity facets.
• Easy search and discovery
over large data sets and
multiple data types
• Automatically associates
data with facet entities
• Monitors data sources for
topic matches, reducing
manual searching
• Increases analyst
efficiency with one view of
data
• Works in unclassified and
classified environments
An advanced user interface helps the analyst examine the content,
leveraging intelligent faceted navigation that categorizes the
articles by entities extracted using natural language processing.
Synonym taxonomies automatically expand search terms to include
their synonyms, spelling variations and specializations. For example,
a search for “homemade explosives” will match “home-made
explosive,” “HME”, and “ammonium nitrate.” ISS has built
taxonomies for many different mission types including counter-IED,
counter-terrorism, WMD proliferation, law enforcement, targeting,
social crises, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
Here is an example of how Topic Builder works.
Topic Builder Main Screen
1. Simple search box.
2. Source facet shows the
number of articles matching
‘SAM site’ for each source.
3. Additional entity facets,
including mission-specific
ones, help the user quickly
find relevant information.
4. Search results showing
classification, title, date
processed, a short gist, and
relevant thumbnails.
More Time for Analysis – Matching Unstructured Data to Topics
The data that Topic Builder ingests is processed to extract the textual contents, index them and
enrich them with metadata. Analysts create their own “topics” by characterizing the information
they are interested in, often expressed initially as a search query (any search query can be converted
into a topic with a mouse click). Once topics are defined, Topic Builder sorts through incoming
articles and notifies the analyst when relevant information matches their topics. This significantly
reduces the amount of time the analyst spends searching and provides more time for analysis.
Additionally, topics can be shared among users - enabling many analysts to subscribe to the same
topic - reducing ramp up time for new analysts.
Identify Geospatial Patterns - Map View
Any list of search results can be projected on a map to expose meaningful patterns. A default
primary location is associated with each article using natural language processing techniques
(analysts can change the primary location if desired). As shown below, the map is interactive and
allows the user to view the titles of reports by clicking the map pin icons.
Map View of Search Results.
The analyst quickly ‘shrinks the haystack’ to identify
80 reports of SA-2 SAM sites within an area of
interest by combining the search term “SAM site”
with the Air Defense Facility facet filter “SA-2”.
Multi-faceted View of Entities - Reviewing Articles
Clicking on any search result in the List, Table or Map View presents the article within the Document
View. Entities like people, locations, organizations, and dates referenced within the article are
highlighted automatically. Highlighted entities are clickable to provide a “quick search” to find any
available related information. All metadata collected when the article was ingested are displayed
here, as are links to the original article and a mini-map display of all the locations mentioned. The
user can apply their own tags to any article, which becomes useful for categorizing articles for later
recall and analysis.
Single Search View - A Single Repository for Multiple Data Types
Topic Builder gathers information from many information sources, making the solution available
from a single search interface. Topic Builder is very flexible and can accept RSS feeds, relational
database records, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, PDF files, SharePoint documents and
Twitter feeds, plus manual upload of other files through a simple drag and drop feature. Other
sources can be easily configured using Topic Builder’s Content Acquisition system. Topic Builder was
designed to work seamlessly with other ISS products including CIDNE, INDURE and WebTAS.
Multi-Source Data
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PDF
HTML
Email (IMAP)
Text Files
TopicBuilder
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XML and derivatives
Microsoft Office formats
Relational databases
Microsoft SharePoint
• Can index metadata within many image,
video and other binary formats
• Twitter streaming data