LAW: A Workbench for Approximate Pattern Matching in Relational Data

Pattern matching for intelligence organizations is a challenging problem. The data sets are large and noisy, and there is a flexible and constantly changing notion of what constitutes a match. We are developing the Link Analysis Workbench (LAW) to assist an expert user in the intelligence community in creating and maintaining patterns, matching those patterns against a large collection of relational data, and manipulating partial results. This paper describes two key facets of the LAW system: (1) a pattern-matching module based on a graph edit distance metric, and (2) a system architecture that supports the integration and tasking of multiple pattern matching modules based on their capabilities and the specific problem at hand.