A Broker Architecture, Push-Pull Database System for Intelligence Analysis

Database technology, while quite powerful, is not well suited to Intelligence analysis. One of its drawbacks is the fact that queries are answered as they are posed to the system, and then forgotten. But analysts that are asked to write a report and query the database in order to gather information usually have a certain amount of time to work on such report. If the database is updated and changes are not reported, the analyst may miss relevant, up-to-date information. In this paper, we propose an approach to solve this problem. The approach uses a Broker architecture to develop a push-pull system that allows users to either push documents into the database or pull documents out of the database as needed. Our approach is conceptually simple and can be implemented on top of off-the shelf relational technology. Also, it can be extended to support more sophisticated functionality.