Case Study: The Arlington Institute

The Arlington Institutes Develops Government Intelligence Application which Transforms Analysis from Months to Minutes

Reactor 5 provides Web Services Orchestration and workflow framework for the SOA Application

Meet the Arlington Institute

Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, The Arlington Institute (TAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute that specializes in thinking about global futures and trying to influence rapid, positive change by applying newly emerging technologies to today’s issues.

The Business Challenge

TAI was contracted to create a government intelligence research software application to collect, store, extract and analyze data for tracking global trends and potential surprise events. Many government agencies currently running these research processes are heavily dependent upon manual processes to scour the Internet or classified data sources, clip articles and compile them into central repositories for later dissemination and analysis. The Arlington Institute set out to create a coherent and all-encompassing system that would provide a collaborative environment integrating a large number of 3rd party tools in an analytic workbench in support of the government analysts.

The Technical Challenge

The end users of the solution would typically be knowledge workers and analysts that have had to deal with processing vast amounts of data using uncoordinated toolsets with a plethora of proprietary data formats. To be effective, these people have had to organize, internalize, and then transform huge datasets into a representation that facilitates their analysis. The components that constitute the end solution would need to perform most of this processing automatically.

In order to fully automate the entire research process, the end solution would need to integrate multiple preexisting research tools, new automation components, along with human tasks and various human roles. In addition, the solution would need to be able to quickly change research processes as necessary to complete the task at hand and new needs over time. It would also need to integrate with multiple technologies:

• .Net based web services
• J2EE-based web services
• Databases
• Legacy applications (command-line driven applications, without a programming interface)
• User authentication and authorization mechanisms

Finding the Right Partner & Solution

Initially TAI searched for an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tool that could integrate all the complex, disparate technical components that the end-solution would possess. In further developing their criteria, TAI determined that the end-solution would expose the toolset as web services using a service oriented architecture (SOA).

The analysis process would be orchestrated across multiple tools and users, providing seamless transformation of data throughout the process. Any selected enabling solution would therefore need to accommodate:

• Multiple Web Service standards (.Net, J2EE, SOAP, WSDL)
• The ability to transform data as part of the processing
• A role-based authorization model to assist in routing work across the people in the organization
• Customization and extension by end users
• High availability
• Vendor neutrality

A variety of tools were examined, ranging from data transformation engines to full workflow solutions. During the selection process, the need for both a full workflow solution and a web services orchestration tool became apparent.

After much evaluation, Oak Grove Systems’ Reactor 5 business process engine emerged as the leading choice for creating a comprehensive solution. Reactor 5 was selected for its:

• Platform Neutrality
• Vendor Neutrality
• API support, including Java, XML, and WSDL interfaces to the function provided by the engine
• Ability to orchestrate web services, as well as manage human workflow activities
• Support for scheduling repeated activities
• Ability to integrate disparate technologies through common infrastructure
• Capacity for easy changes on-the-fly
• Easy to use business process modeling tool
• Ease in integrating with existing authentication and authorization infrastructure
• Auditing and traceability of process execution

The Reactor 5 Solution

Using Reactor 5 from Oak Grove Systems TAI was able to create DIANE, their DIgital ANalysis Environment tool as a research automation solution. Reactor 5 chains the individual web services together that were required to create a robust research system, sequences the acquired data analysis (technical and human-based) and manages the transfer of control from tool to tool (and person to person) within DIANE.

One of the functions of DIANE is to monitor data feeds using a variety of analytic tools; an example of this is the construction of an entity network from a data feed. Incoming data provided by a web service is passed through an entity extraction engine (another web service) which performs natural language processing to identify the people, places, organizations, and countries that have been mentioned in the data. The resulting set of entities and the text identifying the relationship is then transformed and stored in a database.

The results are made available in the form of an i2 Analyst's Notebook document that graphically presents the results of the analysis by converting the structured representation from the database into an XML document, which is then bridged into Analyst's Notebook proprietary format for display.

Generating these complex process diagrams without DIANE would take anywhere from days to months, depending on the dataset and the analyst. With DIANE and Reactor, these documents can be constructed almost automatically (the analyst still has to identify criteria for inclusion), and then be continually updated.

Elapsed time is usually measured in minutes, rather than days. The analyst does not have to process all of the data, nor suffer the data entry task and associated attendant errors to get the information in a usable form.

The result is better analysis delivered in a more timely fashion with less effort. The analysts spend less of their time with the drudgery of poorly integrated toolsets, and more time performing their job function. Further benefits accrue from the separation of business processes from the implementation of the services. The workflow used in the generation of the network can be quickly and easily updated to accommodate improvements in tooling or analysis methodologies, as well as easily enabling different modes of analysis.

The Results

Using Reactor 5 as a web services orchestration and workflow tool has allowed TAI to deploy a better solution with less effort than would have otherwise been possible. Reactor 5 provides the support to model analytic and business processes, run and monitor them, and handle exceptions.

Without Reactor, TAI would have had to build or do without role-based collaboration in business processes, asynchronous processing of data, scheduling capabilities, and auditing. Without Reactor, DIANE would have probably been built on the alphabet soup of emerging XML standards, complicating the implementation and slowing the development schedule. With Reactor, TAI has a robust mechanism to implement processes that:

• Is easy to use
• Improves the productivity of staff
• Performs well
• Avoids vendor lock-in and exposure to evolving standards.

From a development perspective, TAI programmers spend less time doing integration of the toolsets, and more time improving the analytic capabilities of DIANE. The loosely-coupled services in the architecture married with Reactor 5's ability to orchestrate the services provides a very fluid, dynamic implementation that is easy to build, maintain, and extend. Operationally, Reactor 5's ability to update process definitions without bringing down the system is crucial in meeting quality of service requirements for availability.

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