Mining Textual Data to Boost Information Access in OSINT

The revolution in information technology is making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable. The International Intelligence Communities have seen open sources grow increasingly easier and cheaper to acquire in recent years. Up to 80% of electronic data is textual and most valuable information is often encoded in pages which are neither structured, nor classified. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous for language used, and transforming them into information is therefore inextricably linked to the concepts of textual analysis and synthesis, hinging greatly on the ability to master the problems of multilinguality. This paper describes SYNTHEMA SPYWatch, a content enabling system for OSINT,which has been adopted by some Intelligence operative structures in Italy to support the collection,processing, exploitation, production, dissemination and evaluation cycle. By this system, operative officers can get an overview of great volumes of textual data,which helps them discover meaningful similarities among documents and find all related information.