This Technical Report describes a Concept Map (CMap) Knowledge Model (KM) of intelligence analysis developed at DRDC Toronto. The CMap KM consists of a number of interlinked CMaps and over 100 additional resources (such as text documents, images, Internet links, etc.), organized into an interactive hyperlinked system, which serves as a resource depository and provides an easy access to relevant material. The CMap KM captures the research team’s conceptual understanding of various issues relevant to intelligence analysis and brings together a number of pertinent topics. The authors’ aspiration for this CMap KM is that it might serve as a springboard for further development of concepts essential to intelligence analysis and as a foundation for an intelligence analysis education program.
The evolution of the international security environment requires that intelligence services be tailored in a way so they respond coherently, efficiently and in time to threats. The changes must not only focus on how intelligence structures act, but also on how intelligence analysts operate. Mind maps are the proper tools designed to shed light on complicated issues and to find creative solutions to extremely complex problems.
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the benefits of developing heuristic thinking in the information analysis process and to explain why intelligence analysts should use more frequently this technique.
Although heuristic schemes may initially seem to be a method of little relevance in the field of intelligence, this article aims to prove the exact opposite.
Keywords: mind maps; intelligence analysis; intelligence; information; crisis; analysis.
Amidst all the brouhaha over the threats and benefits of AGI I coincidentally found myself listening to a BBC Sounds programme called In Our Time about mitochondria.
One of the really interesting things in this fascinating programme was that there is now a well-respected but underdeveloped theory that the two genomes in our cells - nuclear and mitochondrial - arose from the serendipitous absorption or ingestion of a bacterium by some sort of primitive eukaryotic cell. In the ensuing struggle for survival - which of us will eat the other first, the bacterium from inside or the cell from outside? - there arose inside the host cell an extraordinarily beneficial symbiosis - whence endosymbiosis - which led to the bacterium surrendering its DNA to the host cell in return for the opportunity to generate - eventually - ATP and so the energy that allowed both to survive and thrive and become the dominant cell-mechanism of all known life.
And I thought: yes, and if we don’t blow the chance, or get spooked by all the scare-mongers, exactly that kind of mutually-beneficial symbiosis could be the future and our salvation, mutatis mutandis, for humanity and AGI.