MIPS: A service-based aid for intelligence analysis

The Management of Information Processing Services (MIPS) project has two main objectives; the notification to analysts of the arrival of relevant new information and the automatic processing of the new information. Within these objectives a number of significant challenges were addressed. To achieve the first objective, the team had to demonstrate the capability for specific analysts to be "tipped-off" in real-time that textual reports and sensor-data have been received that are relevant to their analytical tasks, including the possibility that such reports have been made available by other nations. In the case of the second objective, the team had to demonstrate the capability for the infrastructure to automatically initiate processing of input data as it arrives, consistent with satisfying the analytical goals of teams of analysts, in as an efficient a manner as possible (including the case where data is made available by more than one nation). Using the Information Fabric middleware developed as part of the International Technology Alliance (ITA) research program, the team created a service based information processing infrastructure to achieve the objectives and challenges set by the customer. The infrastructure allows existing software to be wrapped as a service and/or specially written services to be integrated with each other as well as with other ITA technologies such as the Controlled English (CE) Store or the Gaian Database. This paper will identify the difficulties in designing and implementing the MIPS infrastructure together with describing its architecture and illustrating its use with a worked example use case.