The Distributed Common Ground System–Marine Corps (DCGS-MC) integrates intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) processing and exploitation capabilities into a single, net-centric environment. DCGS-MC supports intelligence analysts across the Marine Force by making ISR data more visible, accessible, and understandable. The DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB) serves as the basis for interoperability between the DCGS programs in the various services.
Modus Operandi developed a system that allows Marine Corps intelligence analysts to rapidly search large amounts of unstructured data, find critical patterns and other essential elements, and share their work with other analysts.
Our system is based on a semantic wiki that makes data more visible, accessible, and understandable. The wiki environment supports collaboration, reduces duplication of effort, and aids individual efforts. We enhanced the basic wiki by adding semantic capabilities—which enabled finer-grained, more accurate searches, and we added the ability to automatically generate pages and some page content.
To address the need to integrate relevant information from unstructured documents, we coupled the semantic wiki capabilities with text analytics. Our text analytics includes these functions: (1) identifies events of interest to analysts—such as IED events, observation events (sighting of a high-value-individual or HVI), and travel events (movement of an HVI from one location to another), (2) transforms events into Resource Description Framework (RDF) “triples”, and finally, (3) saves the RDF in a triple store database that supports advanced queries. Analysts can automatically create pages for these events by importing them into the semantic wiki from the triple store.
Collectively these analytic tools combined in the semantic wiki expose DCGS-MC data to DIB searches without the need to manually create metadata cards (a means to identify data) and insert them into a DIB metadata catalog (MDC).
