Year
2011
Abstract
Because of the inherently geographic nature of the processes of nuclear proliferation, successful analysis requires appropriate tools for collecting and utilizing geographically referenced data to supplement safeguard activities. Although geographic information systems or GIS-based tools are currently being developed for use in a wide variety of nuclear safeguard activities including site inspection, verification and wide-area environmental sampling, analysts tasked with gathering information to support safeguards activities frequently lack the capabilities and tools necessary for extracting and making efficient use of geospatial data from open sources, notably the Internet. The authors have surveyed a number of open source GIS tools with the goal of integrating and/or modifying them to create an easily learned, interoperable toolset. Such a toolset is designed to systematically extract, organize, and store geospatial data from the Internet. Because open source software is by definition fully available to developers, it is ideally suited to customization to better fit specific use-cases, such as nonproliferation analyses. This paper will summarize our results to date to evaluate these tools and integrate them into the analyst’s workflow. Existing and emergent information systems will be discussed, especially our use of a wide spectrum of Internet resources and an enhanced, customized version of Zotero, an open source reference management system.