Cable Abstracting and Indexing System (CANIS) prototype

The CANIS customer receives cables from sites worldwide, indexes the entities mentioned in these cables and stores that information for access by analysts at a later date. The CANIS customer indexes large quantities of information mostly manually, and wishes to reduce the human resources applied to this task. Incoming cables are processed, information is extracted and stored in corporate databases. Cables with useful data are abstracted and indexed. The result of the abstracting and indexing process is a set of index records about the entities that were described in a cable. The abstracting and indexing process is a time consuming and laborious task. Analysts must read every cable and extract the information that should be placed in the new index records or update existing records. Although the abstracting portion of the task has been automated, it is only a small part of the abstracting and indexing process. The majority of the effort is the indexing part of the process. At present, there is little or no automation support for the indexing part of the process. The CANIS prototype is intended to assist the CANIS customer with the cable indexing task. CANIS automatically extracts entity information, builds and updates index records from cables, and presents it for review. CANIS' analysts can (1) approve the system generated index records, (2) add more information to the system generated index records, or (3) ignore the system generated index records and create their own. CANIS also extracts and stores relationship information (such as family relations, employment, and affiliations).