This morning I was listening to my favorite dutch radio station BNR (Business News Radio). They were talking about the statement of president Obama on the terrorist act on christmas day 2009 (see CNN / Daily News NY).

He stated that the “this was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we allready had” (see USATODAY). “The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community (red. CIA) failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.” (See Politico). “The US government had sufficient information,” he said, “but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots…. That is unacceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” (See CSMONITOR).

In these times of realtime data warehousing and data mining I must conclude that again the childs mind is the best way to explain things to people in the (Oval) office and Pentagon. Visualise Data Mining and turning Intelligence / Information into Knowledge (and eventually Wisdom) can be done by using a simple drawing…

Turning the collected data into information, and using this information to gain knowledge about certain passengers, to eventually get this wisdom to forecast possible terroristic people, is as simple as connecting the dots / data. It’s the relation / connection / glue that ties them together and gives the bigger picture. In the future this way of working might lead to recognition of patterns (data mining …) and predictive analysis about the data – information – knowledge (see DIKW).

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