PHERL: An Emerging Representation Language for Patterns, Hypotheses, and Evidence

Contents

Managing and analyzing information remains an enduring and essential challenge for intelligence professionals. Link analysis tools are beginning to be adopted in the intelligence community as part of the community’s analysis toolset. However, since a wide variety of types of analyses is possible, even within just the link analysis field, no one tool is likely to be sufficient to complete an analysis. Instead, analysts will be required to use a suite of tools to accomplish their tasks. This motivates the need for interchange languages between tools, so they can be used in coordinated workflows to meet the needs of the intelligence analyst. We are developing PHERL, an interchange language for link analysis tools, which is designed to support the sharing of patterns and hypotheses (e.g., patternmatch results). This paper presents our preliminary work and solicits contributions of representation requirements from the link analysis community.