Government workers and their contractors are intensely interested in everything that is being said about Gov 20 now and would like a place where they could get a distillation and visualization of that. Well today we can show you one solution that provides some interesting insights!

Chris Holden, Community Manager for Recorded Future, helped me use their tool for visualization of Gov20 events on the Internet from over 25,000 sources dating back to May.

The result shown above is a treemap of significant sources. The treemap view allows you to see how one entity relates to others depending on their respective categories. Each category, companies or organizations (red), products (green), places (blue), persons (yellow), etc., is colored individually.

The treemap is organized into entity blocks of different sizes depending on their momentum; the larger the block, the higher the entity’s current momentum. Momentum takes into account the volume of media flow around an entity or event, the credibility and visibility of sources where it’s mentioned, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors.

When one mouses over, say radar, the momentum is shown as a “sparkline” meant to convey trends in sentiment (the tone language around an event). Next mouse-over the upper right hand corner of US Government where there is a spyglass and click on it to see more details. (See the live version which now displays in a lighter, easier to read schema.)

Recorded Future, which is backed by the CIA and Google, does three things:

• Scours the web (continually scans thousands of high-quality news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more);
• extracts, analyzes & ranks (extract information from text including entities, events, and the time that these events occur and measure momentum as well as sentiment); and
• makes it useful (explore the past, present and predicted future of almost anything with powerful visualization tools to see temporal patterns, or link networks of related information).

We used this technology to display the results of many Internet sources on the debit ceiling issue in my recent Mountain of Debt: Seeing and Understanding the Numbers article.

For more on Recorded Future see an excellent interview by Reuters Insider of the company’s CEO Christopher Ahlberg on their blog.

https://www.recordedfuture.com/