The US Department of Defence has been struck by an idea to forecast future using the data from blogs, twits and news. Piles of unstructured texts are supposed to be analyzed by computers.
One of the Pentagon units announced the tender for new computer tools to analyze mounds of information, as people will hardly manage to deal with increasing data flow. The Pentagon aims to build an open source system uniting tools which collect, manage and draw relationships between data sets. Analysis of texts will provide for forecasting the future.
Within the system, all the news, blog posts, twits etc. will form clusters of information containing regularities and patterns necessary to make forecasts.
The US Naval Research Laboratory would like the system to detect hidden networks too. Moreover, the way information and money circulate within social networks will also be studied. The research project will be financed with $500,000 yearly.
It should be said that Russia has similar mechanisms of information analysis, such as systems for social networks analysis which help to predict outcome of elections, and so on.
