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The Navy is developing a new software-based intelligence system that fuses information from a variety of sources to more quickly and efficiently identify possible security threats, according to the company building the system.

The military arm has awarded a Phase 1 small business innovative research contract to Florida-based Modus Operandi to build an intelligence-analysis and counterintelligence system called the Semantic Targeting and All-source Fusion Framework, or STAFF.

The company is not disclosing the amount of the award, according to a Modus Operandi spokesperson.

The system combines a range of ways to gather intelligence information -- including human intelligence, signals intelligence, full-motion video, and moving-target indicator data, the last of which involves using radar to find a moving target among fixed objects, according to the company.

STAFF will take the varied intelligence information it gathers and use both text analytics and semantic technologies to model and create relationships between the entities, activities, and events that information identifies, according to Modus Operandi.

Authorized military personnel can then use the Navy's enterprise network to access the relationships created by STAFF to gauge threat possibilities, the company said.

STAFF is aimed at reducing the workload of Navy intelligence analysts and improving their effectiveness to identify targets and threats because it automates the collection and analysis of disparate information, according to an abstract about the system posted online.

Modus Operandi also expects the system can be used by both law enforcement agencies and border protection authorities, it said.

STAFF also includes a counterinsurgency tool that leverages Web services created within the system to work with existing intelligence information already stored on the Navy's network. The tool can be integrated with the Navy's Distributed Common Ground System, a global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance integration network, to improve intelligence threat analysis, according to the company.

Modus Operandi is currently at work on another key analytics project with the Navy. The company last April was awarded a $600,000 contract to a build a service oriented architecture framework for an ongoing project to improve the way submarines gather and analyze operational data. The firm is developing software that uses semantics to fuse and analyze intelligence information from different sensors on submarines as part of the Navy's Wave System of Systems project.