Fusion of open source information

Open source information on the Internet can contribute significantly to such assessments as competitive intelligence, business trends, or evolving social attitudes. Unfortunately, this information is mostly unstructured text, and varies widely in accuracy, focus, and level of impartiality. Estimates on factors important to planning and decision-making, such as likely responses of competitors to a corporation's market actions, can be inferred from competitors' past actions, their corporate strengths and interests, and their executives' personalities. Elements related to these factors can be gleaned from press releases, historical records, and corporate profile information. To make the overall assessment, these elements must be combined. This paper describes a methodology for fusion of open source information now under development for a major U.S. government organization. This process employs formal ontologies for the fusion domain and for evidential reasoning, a commercial tool for text extraction and structuring, and tools to help operators review, edit, and augment the fusion products. It features a fusion pedigree to document the audit trail of sources and processes contributing to a fusion product. The fusion steps are: 1) collect structured and unstructured information related to the entity or event of interest; 2) extract and structure free text; 3) create "event reports" from each structured record, whether derived from free text or previously structured sources; 4) create ontology-based communication reports from these records, 5) associate these reports, 6) cue manual search for additional information, and 7) fuse the information.