IT vendors work to meet gov't information sharing needs

Instant messaging is quickly becoming a valuable tool in the military, law enforcement agencies and domestic security agencies, Helfrich said. The Jabber tool allows both one-to-one IM conversations and group IM meetings and can be set up within seconds.

After Helfrich had talked about seeing Navy command center staff members carrying on sometimes four or five IM conversations at one time, with one conversation often feeding information into another, Russell of DHS told his audience about the need domestic security workers have for chat programs that allow "synchronous simultaneous conversations" across agency hierarchies.

While Helfrich trumpeted Jabber's interoperability, Randy Ridley, vice president and general manager of federal systems at MetaCarta Inc., talked about developing smart technology that can interact with a range of different databases. MetaCarta's Geographic Text Search (GTS) program can dig through different databases and plot geographic information contained in those databases onto a map.

For example, GTS could dig out information on car bomb attacks in Iraq contained in several different military and intelligence databases and pinpoint those attacks on a map, and let users click on the pinpoints to get back to read the original document. MetaCarta then allows users to look for trends, such as enemy attacks on a battlefield or gang activity in a large city, Ridley said.

The GTS tool has been available for about 18 months, and it has between 50,000 and 100,000 users, many of them in the U.S. military, Ridley said. The company is currently testing its products for state and local government agencies in Arizona. The cost of MetaCarta's product can range from $25,000 up to $1 million, based on its use.

About 80 percent of intelligence reports contain some type of geographic data -- some of it specific information such as a street address or more general information, such as a point 60 miles north of Baghdad, he said. By pulling out that geographic data, GTS gives users a common point of reference -- a map. Interoperability isn't a big concern to MetaCarta because geographic information is already a commonly understood language -- turn left and drive 2.3 miles means the same thing to a terrorist as it does to a police officer, Ridley said. "We don't care about standards that much," Ridley said. "We read documents like human beings do."