Using Concept Maps to More Efficiently Create Intelligence Information Models

Information models are a critical tool for U.S. intelligence agencies to allow their customers to quickly and accurately comprehend their products. The Knowledge Pre-positioning System (KPS) is the standard repository for information models at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). The current approach used by NASIC to build a KPS information model is laborious and costly. Intelligence analysts design an information model using a manual, butcher-paper-based process. The output of their work is then entered into KPS by either a single NASIC KPS "database modeler" or a contractor (at a cost of roughly $100K to the organization). This thesis proposes a tool-supported approach to allow intelligence analysts to create KPS information models with almost no database modeler or contractor support. Our approach allows analysts to express an information model as a concept map, an analyst-understandable model of an intelligence domain. An existing tool, CmapTools [6], supports the analyst-in-the-loop process of concept map creation. A completed concept map is automatically converted into KPS by a prototype tool, called Cmap Conversion for KPS, created as part of this work. We restrict, to a reasonable degree, how analysts express concept maps within CmapTools to ensure that automatic conversion into KPS is possible. We validated our approach using a representative NASIC-provided KPS infor- mation model: performance of fixed-wing aircraft. Using our tools, a new information model was constructed in 4 hours and 20 minutes, a 89% improvement over the 40 hours estimated by NASIC to complete the same task using their existing approach. For this representative information model, NASIC estimates our approach would save them roughly $200K.