Jack Bauer joins Mossad

MindCite's technology can more efficiently discover when the bad guys are plotting something - and give law enforcement or security agencies a jump-start on stopping them before they can succeed

The TV world is a lot safer than the real world, it would appear. On TV, you have super-good-guy Feds like Jack Bauer, who unfailingly stop the bad guys just in the nick of time. Relying on intelligence, fast computers and apparently very superior software and technology along with the occasional karate chop, Jack has saved the 24-hour day at least once annually for the past eight years or so. We should only be so lucky to have a guy like that helping out with our homeland-security problems!

But believe it or not, there is an Israeli company that brings "24"-style intelligence-gathering capabilities to the common non-TV security agency. With its "semantic Web technology," Rosh Ha'ayin-based MindCite (http://www.mindcite.com) uses ontology - figuring out the relationship between words and concepts - to determine how people, things and situations meet, says MindCite CTO Oren Yosifon.

"Our system gives law enforcement and regulatory agencies the ability to 'unify' information on the Internet, or in free text-like e-mail messages with information locked inside databases, to determine the hidden relationships between entities and cases," he says. Meaning, says Yosifon, that MindCite's technology can more efficiently discover when the bad guys are plotting something - and give law enforcement or security agencies a jump-start on stopping them before they can succeed.

Customers - which include dozens of agencies in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia - use MindCite's Citer, a "focused" Web crawler that detects specific information they are seeking related to the context they've set up. Citer checks out text and links on Web documents, looking for relationships that exist (or might exist) between people, places, objects, events and ideas, and prioritizes the results for clients. Using MindCite's unique ontology engines, the crawler ensures that the data is relevant to the specific searches, connecting it to other pieces of data that may also be important.

In addition, another MindCite component also parses databases, e-mail messages and other Internet communications. Thus, the system can ferret out information on objects, people, events, etc., giving clients an insight into what has already happened, and giving them a better chance at making an educated guess on what may happen next.