Creating an Information Map Using ThemeScape and Ventana

The Age Old Ventana Problem In 30 minutes 17 people submitted 222 sentence long ideas in a Categorizer activity. Now what do we do with all that “stuff” and keep the interest of the group and deliver value? In the good old days (today), the group slogged through a long list (sometimes a very long list) until they developed some level of affinity and then moved on to convergence of some form. (This took the group the rest of the meeting - 5 hours)

Would you like… …. to reduce the amount of time it takes to go from a long list of “stuff” to a affinity grouping in various “buckets” and then begin the real work to make sense from what the group said?

and would you like it to be… Automatic Quick and Present a visual landscape of the data in an information map?

If your answer is YES

A solution is ThemeScape

ThemeScape ThemeScape is a suite of four software products that automatically organizes text-based material into interactive landscapes of information, helping users quickly understand what is inside a document collection, find information of interest, and discover new insights.

The Foundation The foundation of ThemeScape technology began in 1994 when the US Intelligence Community sought new ways to handle massive amounts of data. The Battelle Memorial Institute's Pacific Northwest National Laboratories was asked to help solve the problem of information overload for the Intelligence analyst. After almost three years of development in the laboratory, numerous technology awards, and several successful applications, the core technology was commercialized to form ThemeScape.

You can see this technology in action on the NewsMaps.com Cartia.com

Working with an Information Landscape The concept behind a ThemeScape map is simple: the greater the similarity between any two documents, the closer together they appear on the map. Concentrations of documents about a similar topic literally "pile up" to form peaks, and the distance between peaks shows how closely the topics are related. ThemeScape gives you a clear picture of the information inside. Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary. A mouse click links the user directly to the original document.

A Ventana Meeting

Process Please take the next few minutes to brainstorm plausible adversary uses of nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons by the year 2005 in a private list. We will refer to these uses from now on as "events". Don't submit your events until asked to. When developing your events, please include the actor, target, weapon, and timing used in that event. For example, one possible event might include: Actor: North Korea Target: US facilities in South Korea Weapon: CW Timing: early stages of Korean MTW Thus, we might call this event: "North Korea uses SOF to employ advanced CW agents against U.S. facilities in South Korea in the early stages of a Korea MTW." KEEP THE EVENT DESCRIPTION SHORT.

High Consequence - Low Likelihood High Consequence – Med Likelihood High Consequence – High Likelihood Med Consequence – High Likelihood Med Consequence – Low Likelihood Low Consequence – Low Likelihood Low Consequence – Med Likelihood Low Consequence - High Likelihood

The Question Could we take a Ventana meeting text output and convert it to a ThemeScape information map and add value to the meeting?

Ventana and ThemeScape Exported the Categorizer information to a text file (222 comments) Imported the text document into ThemeScape Developed a ThemeScape Information Map

Results ThemeScape represented the 222 Ventana comments as 15 categories in less then 5 minutes Each of the 15 identified “categories” had the associated comments identified The comments not associated with the 15 “categories” were identified and available for group assignment to the 15 “categories” or to new categories as necessary What took the group of 17 over two hours to accomplish can now be accomplished in 30 minutes by one person

So What In every Ventana meeting the trade is usually how much time does the group have (never enough) and what are their objectives (always more then they can accomplish). Much of the meeting time is spent getting a long list of “stuff” to a shorter more useful list of “processed information” to do real work on.

The Good News Technology exists today that can take a large set of textual “stuff” from a Ventana meeting and organize it into information “sets” or affinities and let the group then make sense of it. Let the group devote their valuable time and energy to making sense of the data vice spending time organizing and categorizing the data (17 people x 2 hours = $10K)

Questions?

Contact Information Robert Beard