Creating knowledge from heterogeneous data stove pipes

The modern day challenges posed by terrorism and crime mean that we must make better use of the data we collect. We need to create a process that can transform different types of explicit and structured data into actionable knowledge. We need to be able to create unified infrastructure that will support a single query across all of the data sources. This unified infrastructure would allow us to integrate different collection stove pipes, including: text, structured data, images, faxes, audio, and video. To create this unified structure, we transform the collection stovepipes into sets of derived data that are integrated with structured data. Knowledge discovery tools are used over the entire set of collected data. This paper will present some of the components that we have been using to create knowledge infrastructures as well as the types of analysis required by our clients.