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 Blogs can be a key for war to terrorism.
This seems to be the logical consequence of a research carried out by the American Air Force Office of Scientific research that recently began financing a new research area that includes a study of blogs.
As the online magazine of the U.S. Department of Defence reported, the research will be provided about $450.000 for a 3-year project named "Automated Ontologically based link Analysis of international Web logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and credible information".
It will focus on blogs' pattern analysis, that is the analysis of contents as well as of what hyperlinks are contained within the blog...
Since hyperlinks work as quotations of something that the blog's owner is dealing with, it will be possible to discover most important events bloggers are writing about, just reviewing the hyperlinks.
Moreover, the researchers are "developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are more interested in at a point in time" said Dr. Brian E.Ulicny, senior scientist that participates the project.
This will allow analysts to set up statistics based on focus topics in order to monitor bloggers trends.
The research is based on the socalled RSTC approach to Blog analysis, that is Relevance, Specificy, Timeliness and Credibility- a method that helps filtering data in order to select just those pieces of information that suit the arranged criteria.
Specifically, Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related to a particular focus, Timeliness has to do with immediacy – how important is a topic now. Credibility is the amount of trust you have in an information source.
Finally, Specificity can provide value to information analysts depending on how general or specific they need the information to be.
The tool, will work aproximately as a search engine, but with a more focused approach, because it won't be based just on key words, but also on sentences that can give a specific meaning to that particoular word.
This point will be fundamental because often in blogs, certain topics aren't dealt with but just commented. For instance it is quite common to put on the daily page of a blog , statements such as "I can't believe that" and then link to a news story.
But why analysing blogs?
The utility of the whole operation becomes clear if we think about the fact that sometimes bloggers called attention to particoular stories, giving a significant contribution in understanding what was going on.
Need more explanations?
The wave of rage that recently spread out after the publication of Prophet Mohammed Cartoons was mainly due to the effects of a virtual tam-tam from one blog to another.
An application that could forecast the growing rage could have helped in forecasting riots?
Maybe.
The point is that, according to the scientists that are carrying out the project, the effords are aimed by the purpose of providing "the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace".
And then use it.
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