The summer 2011 riots across the UK highlighted the need for a social media monitoring tool that can help police and other security organisations react more effectively to fast-moving events. The challenge is that the majority of social media content is not in a form that can be easily interpreted.

The police need a solution that can reliably ingest vast quantities of data, pick out the important elements and combine them with other information to create a knowledge base to analyse using predictive analytics, sentiment analysis and advanced modelling techniques. The tool needs to delve into the new body of knowledge to reveal underlying trends, patterns and social connections as they emerge. If this new intelligence is presented in customisable and intuitive ways, it puts decision-makers in a strong position to react, able to allocate scarce resources quickly and effectively.

This paper looks in more detail at how the explosion in social media content can be harnessed by police, the military, aid workers and commercial organisations to provide actionable intelligence, fast.

Register to download IPL's “Exploiting the Power of Unstructured Social Media Content” white paper.