Human terrain exploitation suite: applying visual analytics to open source information.

This paper presents the concept development and demonstration of the Human Terrain Exploitation Suite (HTES) under development at the U. S. Army Research Laboratory's Tactical Information Fusion Branch. The HTES is an amalgamation of four complementary visual analytic capabilities that target the exploitation of open source information. Open source information, specifically news feeds, blogs and other social media, provide a unique opportunity to collect and examine salient topics and trends. Analysis of open source information provides valuable insights into determining opinions, values, cultural nuances and other socio-political aspects within a military area of interest. The early results of the HTES field study indicate that the tools greatly increased the analysts' ability to exploit open source information, but improvement through greater cross-tool integration and correlation of their results is necessary for further advances.