EU-funded project to prompt intelligence-sharing http://euobserver.com/9/32226

The democratic uprisings in north Africa have exposed the limits of member states' on-the-ground knowledge of the region, but a project sponsored by EU money aims to get national intelligence agencies used to the idea of sharing information on everything from brewing conflicts to migration flows and terror threats. In an unassuming building a stone's throw from the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels, a group of experts is overseeing the development of software that will make it easier to deal with what intelligent experts call the "tsunami of information" in the public sphere.While the information is in the open - either in traditional sources such as newspapers or radios or online in blogs and social networking sites - harvesting and analysing so-called "open-source intelligence" in order to better anticipate or manage events is hampered by a lack of compatible technology.

Virtuoso (standing for the unwieldy Versatile Information Toolkit for End Users Oriented Open Source Exploitation), when ready, is to be a one-stop platform for the use of all analytic tools such as speech-to-text software, tools that show where people are speaking from or tools that process proper nouns and locations."What we are developing is the integration framework where you can plug in all the different tools that you might use and they can all communicate with one another," says Axel Dyevre, from European Strategic Intelligence Company (CEIS), one of the partners in the project.

With a budget of €11.45 million, of which €8 million is EU R&D money, the project has 17 partners including TNO, a Dutch research organisation, Denmark's Aalborg University, the Austrian company Sail Labs (specialised in speech to text technology) and Newstin, a data acquisition company.The first big test will be in June when three scenarios - border security in Greece; arms proliferation and a potential attack on member-state infrastructures - will be used to showcase the project. Watching will be a roomful of officials from the EU border agency Frontex, the EU crisis centre (SitCen), the EU satellite centre as well as experts from national intelligence agencies, military and police personnel and foreign and defence ministry officials.

[EXPANDING THE ORWELLIAN,DRACONIAN FRONTEX CAPABILITIES,NOT GOOD..FRONTEX: The movie 2.0. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk0SAPqLUJI  Frontex: The Movie (feat. noborder camp in lesvos 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOuFo5egBqE