Hopes to increase information sharing among law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security communities
Vienna, VA — October 20, 2003 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has selected Convera's RetrievalWare as a search and categorization platform within the Agency's new Investigative Data Warehouse. The initial value of the deployment of Convera's software is approximately $1.5 million.
After the events of September 11th, the FBI created a Secure Collaborative Operational Prototype Environment (SCOPE) with a counter-terrorism and intelligence data repository. The FBI said it selected RetrievalWare for the repository to improve the sharing of intelligence information and collaboration across multiple government agencies, enhancing the government's ability to prevent terrorist attacks.
Covera said RetrievalWare would work with other tools to help FBI analysts identify pieces of intelligence within the massive information repository that they will then use to drive investigative and intelligence activities. Specific RetrievalWare capabilities required by the FBI for the project include security options, real-time message profiling, breadth of language support, multimedia search, scalability and new dynamic classification capabilities.
Convera said that information sharing among intelligence agencies will be reinforced by RetrievalWare's ability to sort through data to find the minute details agents need to respond to possible homeland security threats. RetrievalWare will also allow FBI agents to search authorized information in other agency databases, in addition to the FBI's own data repository.
The new Intelligence Data Warehouse system will provide a Web-based, collaborative environment for hundreds of agents who will eventually analyze over one billion text, video, audio and image files. Using RetrievalWare, agents can compare and contrast relevant information and find missing links by securely accessing the Agency's Investigative Data Warehouse.
RetrievalWare 8 is Convera's newest offering, a knowledge discovery platform that the provider said helps large organizations automate their knowledge management and discovery processes, using an infrastructure that can be used for specific industry and government agency applications.
