The novel Coronavirus was first identified December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has spread rapidly from country to country bringing devastation in the form of mass illness and death due to the COVID-19 disease it causes. Micro Focus IDOL, an AI insight engine, is perfectly positioned to help track how the virus spreads, and the scale of the impact on public health services and the economy wrought by this virus has never been seen before in peacetime and has left governments and organizations struggling to understand the spread of the disease and how to slow it.
IDOL derives contextual and conceptual insights from a multitude of data sources. It can identify relationships that exist within virtually any type of information and Micro Focus runs a demo environment that indexes a limited subset of news articles, broadcast monitoring feeds from various TV and radio channels, Twitter and RSS feeds and other open sources continuously.
This is a classic case of Open Source Intelligence and demonstrates how IDOL can be used to track the spread of world-changing events like this COVID-19 coronavirus disease outbreak.
By typing in the keyword “Coronavirus” within the FIND tool, IDOL can quickly identify and group related concepts, which are automatically identified by statistical analysis as important in the corpus of data within the index. The image shows a visual presentation of this, known as the “Topic Map”, which enables an analyst to see a snapshot of all the information related to the given topic and drives discover of new clusters of information.
Using IDOL’s geotagging capabilities of unstructured text, we are able to map information to cities across the world affected by COVID-19 cases. The map shows mentions of the disease throughout the web by assigning geographic locations either from metadata or by pulling out place names referenced by those mentions.
IDOL uses a spectrograph to track the evolution of topics of interest through time. We are now publishing live via our website News Spectrum which displays the spread of Coronavirus #COVID-19 on a day-to-day basis. The thickness of the lines between news topics indicates in the volume of news articles reflecting those topics. You can also see how a given topic branches into related sub-topics as the complexity of the effects of Coronavirus on out societies evolve.
A demo version of Micro Focus IDOL has been indexing a limited subset of information about the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak by analyzing news articles, broadcast news feeds from various TV channels, Twitter and RSS feeds, every day and has captured and indexed over 22 million documents. IDOL can derive insights from audio, visual and textual information also known as “unstructured data”. This is the classic use-case of Open Source Intelligence. IDOL is able to automatically identify and present the key concepts in this ocean of data to provide instant and comprehensive situational awareness of this era-defining pandemic.
