A multi-agent system of evidential reasoning for intelligence analyses

This paper describes a Multi-Agent System intended for assisting military commanders and intelligence analysts in the discovery and analysis of publicly available information that may have intelligence value (Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT). Our system is called Webster, which is a pun on the well-known dictionary and the World Wide Web. An innovative feature of Webster is the trust network that allows for the hierarchical integration of judgements provided by both human and computer agents, and the ability to extend the system by adding new agents that encapsulate a given characterization capability - such as the ability to provide a level of facial recognition on images that may be embedded in web pages. A key challenge is in creating a normalized concept structure or belief frame that all participating agents, at a certain level, can use to focus their analysis and render opinions that can be meaningfully combined with the opinions of other entities in the system. Webster can scale from a single machine to a large interconnection of subject matter experts and special-purpose computer systems by providing proxy agents that act as intermediaries in the system.