SPIDER: Selective Plotting of Interconnected Data and Entity Relations

Abstract

Intelligence analysts have long struggled with an abundance of data that must be investigated on a daily basis. In the U.S. Army, this activity involves reconciling information from various sources, a process that has been automated to a certain extent, but which remains highly manual. To promote automation, a semantic analysis prototype was designed to aid in the intelligence analysis process. This tool, called Selective Plotting of Interconnected Data and Entity Relations (SPIDER), extracts entities and their relationships from text in order to streamline investigations. SPIDER is a web application that can be remotely-accessed via a web browser, and has three major components: (1) a Java API that reads documents, extracts entities and relationships using Stanford CoreNLP, (2) a Neo4j graph database that stores entities, relationships, and properties; (3) a JavaScript-based SigmaJS visualization tool for displaying the graph on the browser. SPIDER can scale document analysis to thousands of files for quick visualization, making the intelligence analysis process more efficient, and allowing military leadership quicker insights into a vast array of potentially-hidden knowledge.