Collaboration and modeling tools for counter-terrorism analysis

One of the major challenges in counter-terrorism analysis today involves connecting the relatively few and sparse terrorism-related dots embedded within massive amounts of data flowing into the government's intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies. Information technologies have the potential to empower analysts with a superior ability to process and analyze the data, disseminate and share it, and ultimately put the data into a form that allows senior decision-makers to understand and act on it so that they can anticipate and ultimately preempt terrorist plots or attacks from occurring. Advanced collaboration among multiple analysts or tools is one such crucial technology. We introduce NEMESIS, a collaborative environment to integrate and share information among different modeling tools. Two component-modeling tools, ASAM System and ORA, are described in this paper. The functionality of these two tools along with the NEMESIS system is illustrated via a real world example gleaned from open sources.