[Infowarrior] - Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information

[Richard Forno]

Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information
By William J. Sharp, Air Force Office of Scientific Research

URL of this article:
http://www.defencetalk.com/news/publish/printer/printer_6737.php
Wed, 5 Jul 2006, 00:00

Arlington, VA: The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently
began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog
research may provide information analysts and warfighters with
invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar,
president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will
receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project
entitled "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International
Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information."

"It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what's important
in blogs unless you analyze patterns," Ulicny said. Patterns include the
content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the
blog.

Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers
thereby allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers
are writing about in just the same way that one can discover the most
important papers in a field by finding which ones are the most cited in
research papers.

This type of analysis can help information analysts' searches be as
productive as possible.

The blog study is part of Air Force Office of Scientific Research's new
Information Forensics and Process Integration research program recently
launched at Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y.

The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research
emphasis - incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive
design, and active querying; and cognitive processing.

One of the problems analysts may have with blog monitoring, Ulicny
noted, is there is too much actionable information for the analyst to
properly analyze.

"We are developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are
most interested in at a point in time," Ulicny said. This analysis,
Kokar said, is based on what Versatile Information Systems calls the
RSTC approach to blog analysis - relevance, specificity, timeliness, and
credibility. RSTC helps information analysts filter the most important
information to study.

"Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related
to a particular focus," Kokar said. Timeliness has to do with immediacy
- how important is a topic now. "Credibility," he continued, "is the
amount of trust you have in an information source."

Finally, specificity can provide value to information analysts depending
on how general or specific they need the information to be.

In some ways, the team's automated project works like a search engine
but with a more focused approach. Traditional search engines present
users with information based on, for example, the number of times a term
appears in a document.

The information obtained via a search engine query tends to be similar
among the documents returned. Blog postings, however, can be much more
dissimilar from one to another.

"What we're doing is a sort of information retrieval," Ulicny said. "The
difference is that in order to find and analyze blog entries, you need
to more adequately model how the blogs work on a global scale."

To some degree blog interpretation, he said, involves understanding a
different form of communication.

"Blog entries have a different structure," Ulicny said. "They are
typically short and are about something external to the blog posting
itself , such as a news event. It's not uncommon for a blogger to simply
state, 'I can't believe this happened,' and then link to a news story."

In this example, Ulicny said, there might not be much of interest in the
blog posting, yet the fact that the blogger called attention to this
story can be significant to understanding what matters.

A good example, he said, is the recent furor in the Muslim world over
the publication of cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. The
original publication wasn't much noticed in the West, but bloggers
discussed this event that possibly contributed to riots worldwide.

"The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes
overlooked by military analysts," Kokar said. "Our research goal is to
provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better
understand the information battlespace."