'OSINT and the Pharmaceutical Enterprise'

In its July 2004 report, the 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of an "open-source" intelligence agency — somewhat different than the CIA and NSA. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is defined by the Director of National Intelligence as intelligence "produced from publicly available information that is collected, exploited, and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence requirement." OSINT focuses on creating actionable intelligence from public information, allowing other Federal agencies to focus on creating primary intelligence from covert human sources or listening in on electronic

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However, technology is only one piece of the puzzle. A more central issue is knowing what questions to ask and accurately determining what constitutes an answer.

Question asking (and answering) is a fine art. In our work as consultants, we're often asked a variety of questions, from "What does Wall Street think of our CEO?" to "How many biomarkers can we actually use as prognostics in our clinical trials?" Answering each of these questions requires a different approach.

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To discover content on the Web, search engines typically use web crawlers that follow hyperlinks. This technique is ideal for discovering resources on the surface Web, but is often ineffective at finding Deep Web resources. (The Deep Web — or Deepnet, invisible Web or hidden Web — refers to WWW content not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines.) For example, these crawlers seldom find dynamic pages resulting from database queries due to the infinite number of queries that are possible.

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Alluding to the version-numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase "Web 2.0" hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web; advocates suggest that technologies such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, and online Web services imply a significant change in web usage.

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The use of Web 2.0 technologies to enable on-line communities of interest and social networking is critical to OSINT analysts. These communities allow users of varying interests to connect, network, communicate and publish content on many topics, including several that would be relevant to drug industry best practices, portfolio valuation, and related technologies. Web communities such as MySpace, Friendster, and especially scientifically focused communities such as SciLink are important OSINT sources in collecting data for biopharmaceutical intelligence.

~ full article by James Golden ~

also very interesting: Part 2 and Part 3