AN OVERVIEW OF THE PROTOTYPE INFORMATION DISSEMINATION 
SYSTEM (PRIDES) 
Virginia Cevasco 
Logicon, Operating Systems Division 
2100 Washington Blvd. 
Arlington, VA 22204 
gcevasco@logicon.com 
(703) 486-3500 
INTRODUCTION 
The Prototype Information Dissemination 
System (PRIDES) is a TIPSTER technology 
insertion project sponsored by the Office of Research 
and Development (ORD). PRIDES applies a portion 
of the TIPSTER detection architecture and several 
TIPSTER components to the problem of timely 
dissemination of Foreign Broadcast Information 
Service (FBIS) articles. When PRIDES begins 
operation in July 1996, it will provide one of the first 
production tests of the TIPSTER architecture. 
PRIDES FUNCTIONS 
FBIS collects, translates, and disseminates 
selected foreign media content, including newspaper 
and magazine articles and television and radio 
broadcasts. In addition, FBIS analysts publish 
analyses of trends and patterns across articles. This 
information is available in hard copy on a daily basis, 
or on CD ROM on a quarterly basis. The hard copy 
format is timely, but difficult to work with. The CD 
ROMs are easy to search and process, but not timely. 
PRIDES seeks to provide both timely dissemination, 
customized to a user's particular interests, and 
comprehensive retrospective search support. 
A user describes his dissemination need in 
an interest profile. Then, as new articles are received 
daily, each is compared to the interest profile. If the 
document scores above the threshold for the profile, it 
is added to the user's mail folder. Then the user can 
browse all the articles relevant to their profile. Each 
user may have any number of profiles covering 
different topics. 
PRIDES provides a robust, easy to user 
retrospective search capability against a corpus of 
FBIS articles accumulated since May, 1995. The user 
may write queries in natural language or Boolean 
syntax. The user may also query by example, 
selecting articles which contain the sort of 
information they are interested in and allowing the 
system to build a query to locate similar articles. The 
user may also search within certain fields identified 
by the FBIS users as particularly content rich. These 
fields include date fields, which support date ranging. 
Search results are stored in hit folders. 
The user may create private collections, 
called save folders, storing articles from other folders. 
Save folders allow the user to collect articles from 
both dissemination results and query results for an 
open ended amount of time. Save Folders can also be 
downloaded to the user's local disk for additional 
processing. 
The user can list their mail, hit, and save 
folders, and then open any folder to see a list of the 
folder contents. This list includes a one line 
summary for each article, containing the article 
headline, relevance score, and date. The user has a 
variety of options for sorting and segmenting the 
folder contents list. Each headline is linked to its 
article. The article is displayed in its entirety. Again, 
the user can customize the display format to suit their 
personal work style. 
PRIDES provides a World Wide Web 
interface, suitable for deployment on the Intemet or an 
intelligence community intranet. This provides 
PRIDES to the maximum possible user community, 
while simultaneously eliminating the need for 
PRIDES-specific client side software. Any forms- 
compatible web browser can be used to access 
PRIDES. 
PRIDES SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE 
To fulfill the requirements for the PRIDES 
pilot system and simultaneously lay the foundation 
for the future system, the PRIDES architecture is 
comprised of three layers. Each layer has a unique set 
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of responsibilities, and communicates only with its 
adjacent layer(s) via a well-def'med API. This three- 
layered architecture offers plug-and-play design. 
Software can be inserted into any layer with minimal 
impact on the other layers. This architecture 
promotes PRIDES evolution, because older user 
interfaces can stay in operation while new user 
interfaces are gradually tested and fielded to replace 
them, and new versions, or even different types, of 
TIPSTER-compliant search engines and routing 
engines can be tested without changes to the user 
interface. 
The PRIDES User Interface Layer (PUI) is 
responsible for creating and managing the screen 
displays that comprise the PRIDES user interface. 
The User Interface is implemented using a World 
Wide Web Browser, a Web Server, and the 
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to provide 
custom screens. In this way PRIDES supports the 
most modern lnternet access technology. PUI calls 
the PRIDES Application Layer (PA) to service 
requests and collects and formats that data for easy 
use. PA is responsible for performing any PRIDES- 
specific activity that is not provided by our 
TIPSTER components. PA is also responsible for 
maintaining and validating access privileges and 
collecting, storing and analyzing MIS data. PA 
provides an external message interface to the 
incoming FBIS documents. PA interfaces with the 
TIPSTER Data Access (TDA) layer to store, index, 
search and retrieve PRIDES data via API calls. 
The TDA consists of a set of TIPSTER- 
compliant search engines and database management 
software. The Document Manager software stores and 
indexes documents coming into PRIDES. The 
PRIDES Document Manager is fully TIPSTER 
compliant and available for use in other TIPSTER 
systems. The routing engine and Document Manager 
process user profiles and route these incoming 
documents to mail folders. Similarly, the search 
engine and the Document Manager process user 
queries and build hit folders. TDA satisfies requests 
for retrieval of a PRIDES document, given either an 
internal or external document ID. 
To fulfill the PRIDES requirements, 
Logicon has selected technology products that adhere 
to the TIPSTER architecture, that are consistent with 
an open design, and that can be scaled up to 
accommodate larger volumes of input and more users. 
Where custom software was necessary for the 
PRIDES system, it was designed within the layered 
architecture approach described above, in order to 
guarantee maximum flexibility, scalability and 
extensibility. 
For the PRIDES detection engines, PRIDES 
uses the ACSIOM products INQUERY and InRoute. 
INQUERY is an information retrieval system based 
upon a Bayesian inference network model of 
information retrieval. Inference networks are ideally 
suited for the uncertainties encountered when 
matching a person's statement of an information need 
with a document expressed in natural language. In 
addition to using inference networks, INQUERY 
incorporates several different methods of combining 
evidence, enabling a rich query language in which to 
express information needs. In accordance with 
PRIDES requirements, the INQUERY product was 
modified to: 
Optimize retrieval algorithms. 
Optimize concurrency control to allow frequent 
updates of the document index. 
Upgrade the API for robustness in an integration 
environment. 
Develop natural-language to query-language 
transformations. 
Extend the API to support "query by example" 
and "cancel search." 
Collect resource consumption data. 
InRoute is an inference network system 
tailored for document filtering. Both InRoute and 
INQUERY return identical scores for a given 
document/query pair. While INQUERY is optimized 
for quickly searching one or more multi-gigabyte 
document collections, InRoute is optimized for 
quickly comparing a steady stream of documents to a 
large number of profiles. In accordance with PRIDES 
requirements, the InRoute product was modified to: 
Convert SGML in FBIS articles into TIPSTER 
annotations. 
Develop algorithms for incremental relevance 
feedback to replace the existing batch-oriented 
feedback. 
Upgrade the API for robustness in an integration 
environment. 
Collect resource consumption data. 
Standard COTS Web Server products 
provided the capabilities needed to define the 
PRIDES user interface. A Web Server package, 
augmented by a set of PRIDES-specific Common 
Gateway Interfaces (CGIs), communicates with the 
client via Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). A 
CGI is a standalone script or program invoked by a 
Web Server to provide services beyond those 
included in its suite. In the case of PRIDES, CGIs 
provide access to all PRIDES services and data, 
subject to user access privileges. PRIDES end users 
use a Web Browser to communicate with the Web 
Server. The Web Browser software may be Mosaic, 
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Netscape Navigator, or any other browser which can 
process HTML forms. No special PRIDES software 
is needed in the end user's workstation. These web 
browsers also provide a user-friendly interface to the 
other protocols of the Internet, such as File Transfer 
Protocol (FTP) and Network News Transfer Protocol 
(NNTP), and allow printing of text and graphics on 
the user's local printer. 
PRIDES DEVELOPMENT AND PILOT 
OPERATIONS 
PRIDES was designed and developed by 
Logicon and ACSIOM from June 1995 through April 
1996. After installation at the customer's site and an 
acceptance test period, PRIDES will begin serving 
production users in July 1996. 
PRIDES is a pilot effort which will serve 
users operationally for six months, between July 
1996 and January 1997. Volunteer pilot users will be 
selected from among the FBIS analysts and 
consumers. During pilot operations, an extensive 
evaluation program will gather quantitative and 
qualitative data about how users work with PRIDES. 
The analysis of this data will attempt to evaluate the 
user acceptance of the new features in PRIDES, such 
as the Internet delivery mechanism, relevance 
ranking, and automatic query refmement. The results 
of the evaluation effort will provide input to the 
requirements of the final FBIS softcopy dissemination 
system. 
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