Mastering Data Management

Identification is an extremely complex process that is only compounded by increasing data volumes, complex relationships, and tightly coupled application and data architectures.

Many government organizations are charged with combating terrorism, identifying criminals and effectively applying immigration policies. All these activities require that persons of interests (and their organizations and networks) be accurately identified. Identification is an extremely complex process that is only compounded by increasing data volumes, complex relationships, and tightly coupled application and data architectures.

Counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence initiatives are the domain of the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, and other law enforcement, intelligence and immigration and border control agencies. These groups share many common goals in their efforts to combat criminal activities that impact national security, including:

• Stopping terrorism by finding potential threats before they happen
• Reducing crime by identifying potentially harmful persons of interest when in custody and during field investigations and analysis
• Protecting the nation from potential threats trying to enter the country and detecting other unlawful border crossings
• Meeting or exceeding citizen service expectations (credentialing, verification, renewals, etc.) in an increasingly critical and high-risk environment
• Reducing costs, increasing efficiency and improving the outcome of national security activities and investigations

Despite their common goals, intelligence, integrated law enforcement and immigration and border patrol organizations have their own unique set of demands and requirements. In coming posts, I’ll discuss how each type of organization works and how entity resolution could help them achieve better results.

Gartner has been tracking the entity resolution market for several years and recently stated in their June 2009 “Hype Cycle for Master Data Management, “Entity resolution and analysis was previously an obscure technology that has come to the forefront as a result of world events and market forces where it is used to identify the use of false identities and networks of individuals who are attempting to hide their relationships to each other.”

So how do they define entity resolution? According to Gartner, entity resolution is “the capability to resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exist. This is especially true in cases wherein there exists intentional falsification of information or the creation of false identities. While most prevalent in detecting perpetrators of criminal or illegal activity, more-commercial applications exist as well.”

The other noun classes that Gartner refers to implies the entity resolution problem for persons of interest is inherently multi-domain with its emphasis upon not only persons but also objects, locations and events.

Now that we’ve got a definition, we can move into use cases in the next posts.

Connecting the Dots Across the Intelligence Community
Integrated Law Enforcement - Catching Criminals