POSSIBILITIES FOR INNOVATIVE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH: INFORMATION VISUALIZATION AND EXPERIMENT IN INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH

• Published in: Innovative issues and approaches in social sciences Vol. 6; no. 3; pp. 141 - 160
• Main Authors: Ulcej, Dejan, Svete, Uroš
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: CEOs Ltd 01.09.2013
• Subjects: Decision Making; experiment; Experiments; information quality; information visualization; Innovations; Intelligence; National Security; Revolutions; Scientific Method; Scientific Research; Services; Social Change
• ISSN: 1855-0541; 1855-0541
• DOI: 10.12959/issn.1855-0541.IIASS-2013-no3-art08

In addition to universal social changes, the information revolution also brought a lot of innovation to the workings of intelligence services, which are traditionally the part of the national security system that is conducting data analyses and for which information is the primary product. If in the past the main problem and challenge has been the timely acquisition of data, today most agencies are faced with an entirely different problem -- information overload. This problem is being tackled by technical as well as systemic measures that combine various types of intelligence work. However, there are still unanswered questions regarding the applicability of intelligence products for decision makers. Here we have to point out information visualization as the subject of an interdisciplinary scientific research that definitely shows a lot of potential in the context of the defense science as well. This article points out three key requirements that allow the application of information visualization to defense research: (1) the concept of the intelligence cycle can be used as a good basis for the information that is subject to visualization; (2) the quality of decision-making support information depends on proper visualization; (3) the first two requirements offer a stable theoretical and empirical basis for the introduction of innovative scientific methods in the field of defense science, such as experiments. Adapted from the source document.