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Alien team builds a clean machine

The Defense Intelligence Agency project team that built Alien encountered both unexpected dilemmas and moments of serendipity as they shaped the framework, program manager Ralph Liberati recounted in a message.

“There were two major problems which surfaced during the development and implementation of the Alien,” Liberati said. “First, we discovered that without high-fidelity data, the advanced search features of Alien have significantly reduced value to the analysts.”

The Alien team devoted a significant number of engineering and testing cycles to test its work against live, production data to ensure that the framework properly tags data and provides reliable and repeatable content discovery, he said.

The second problem, Liberati said, was that “many of the [commercial] tools we used within Alien did not respond well to malformed data and data that lacked consistency.”

The team spent many hours designing and building error-handling and exception-processing methods to help clean the data and suppress the commercial tools’ objections to the rocky data.

Meanwhile, the team’s labors to clean the data and provide methods to properly tag the information had an unexpected and welcome side effect.

“The biggest ‘aha’ moment for the Alien team was the realization that the filtering and tagging we were performing to help clean up the data environment could also be used to provide highly secure and robust cross-domain solutions,’’ Liberati said.

— Wilson P. Dizard III

Project at a Glance

WHAT: Defense Intelligence Agency’s All-source Intelligence Environment.

MISSION: Deliver premier intelligence products to customers in the Defense Department and the intelligence community.

CHALLENGE: Improve the information resources available to intelligence analysts working at the top-secret level by bolstering information sharing along with data discovery and interpretation methods.

SOLUTION: DIA built the Alien framework to provide a critical information bridge among the national, theater and tactical command levels, incorporating service-oriented architecture along with market and government standards to improve security and data access.

IMPACT: The Alien Data Systems project as a whole has greatly improved intelligence analysts’ ability to weave together intelligence from various sources that previously were available in or outside the DOD Intelligence Information Systems array, while upgrading security.

COST: DIA estimates that spending on Alien since late 2006 has amounted to about $20 million annually.