DECISIVE ANALYTICS launches Tech-Trakr data acquisition and analysis tool

Supply chain analysis, risk management, product space analysis, and industry analysis are all activities in which the quality of results is driven by the quantity of relevant data that can be processed.  Acquiring data is a time-consuming process that often results in a fraction of the relevant data being retrieved causing analysts to perform multiple rounds of data acquisition. This manual extraction of relevant entities and normalizing and structuring the relevant data detracts from the true goal of the effort – to use industry and supply chain models to identify risks.

To address these problems, DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation (DAC) has launched a new data acquisition and analysis system, Tech-Trakr, that gathers domain-relevant information, both from internal repositories and from open sources, and then normalizes and organizes that information. The Arlington, VA-based company announced the launch June 7.

The main Tech-Trakr workflow has three phases – acquisition, analysis, and presentation. During acquisition, the system acquires content from both internal sources and online content. The system’s ingest pipeline can handle input across a wide variety of file formats, document organization, page layout, text style, and content. These documents are passed through parsers that strip out the decorative formatting and stores the extracted text both for display and processing.

During analysis, Tech-Trakr uses entity, event, and relationship extraction algorithms to detect and annotate information describing who, what, where, when, and how. This information is then organized into entity-based profiles, relationship and network models, and document/content indices. By using DAC’s Natural Language Processing libraries, Tech-Trakr is able to identify entities discussed in text, tie entity mentions together, and determine when relationships between entities are discussed. DAC’s capability has been tailored to domain-specific entity types such as DoD-relevant entities like weapon systems, military organizations, government programs, and military vehicles. All the extracted information is consolidated into the entity-based profiles for easy accessibility.

After completion of analysis, Tech-Trakr presents the results visually via a web-based interface. Analysts can search the ingested documents, quickly view and compare entity profiles, and explore the net of relationships described by the data. Profiles can be exported into PDF files for easy dissemination of the discovered properties and relationships. Tech-Trakr uses a custom suite of search tools and visualizations developed by DAC’s Analytic Technology team allowing for quick identification of risks without the time and energy spent on the manual extraction of data.

Source: DAC