Briefs

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.

Some of Barry Justice, director of the open-source unit at Northrop, favorite tools are:

TextAnalyst: (from Megaputer) 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: currently available only to former and current government agents, correlates and grids documents according to similarity.

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