In the wake of the extremist attacks in Paris and in San Bernadino, California, some suggested the tragedies were a complete failure of intelligence services. That would be hyperbole. However, both of these attacks do serve to highlight the difficulty in protecting modern democratic societies from small group and lone gunman threats. The countries that most treasure “openness” and civil liberties walk a particularly fine line.

Short of creating a STASI-like surveillance state, government

During the last decade, government agencies have collected various data sets, the more the merrier. Inundated with database schemas, documents, emails, web content and XML, agencies are left with daunting integration challenges. Attempts to use existing tools to systematically harvest and correlate data and turn it into insightful information have not been fruitful. Complex manual transformation operations are draining budgets by needing to mobilize IT resources to make sense of existing