From the Bin Laden Letters: Mapping OBL’s Reach into Yemen
I puzzled over this headline. A close friend refers to President Obama as “OB1” so I had a moment of confusion when reading the headline. Didn’t make sense for Bin Laden’s letters to map President Obama’s reach into Yemen.
With some diplomatic cables and White House internal documents, that would be an interesting visualization as well.
The mining of a larger corpus of 70,000+ public sources for individuals mentioned in the Ben Laden letters is responsible for the visualizations.
What we don’t know is what means of analysis produced the visualizations in question.
Some process was used to reduce redundant references to the same actors, events and relationships. Just by way of example.
That isn’t a complaint, simply an observation. It isn’t possible to evaluate the techniques used to obtain the results.
It would be interesting to see Recorded Future in one of the TREC competitions. At least then the results would be against a shared data set.
Do be aware that when the text says “open source,” what is meant is “open source intelligence.”
The better practice would be to say “open source intelligence or (OSINT)” and not “open source,” the latter having a well recognized meaning in the software community.