Analyzing Twitter for Organizational Risk and Security

"Do you integrate Twitter analysis into Visual Command Center?"  Everyone has started asking me this at customer meetings, private and public sector alike.  "Can I search for tweets with specific keywords in this solution?"  A few months ago virtually no one was asking for this, but now it's seems to be the first thing a new customer inquires about.

We consult with a lot of organizations on enterprise/agency physical security in general, and risk visualization in particular, and they tend to have very similar needs and interests.  Visual Command Center was built not only to address the known needs, but also to have the flexibilty to respond to the unknown in the future.  This flexbility means that we can quickly integrate a piece of new functionality like Twitter visualization, and then show it to customers for rapid feedback on the capability.

Visual Command Center shows tweet time, location, and content integrated with other risk and organizational data.

John Nelson, our UX guru, wrote about this integration on his blog in A Twitter Anatomy of a Protest.  It demonstrates the value of our current tweet visualization, and the customers that have seen it are very excited.  Whether they have a list of key terms that they want constantly surfaced, or they are doing ad hoc key word searches to augment their visualization, Visual Command Center helps them see all the tweets in the full context of location, time, and all the other data sources that they care about.

The idea is that tweet visualization helps mitigate risk.  From a security perspective, an event can often be detected sooner and monitored more closely with Twitter than with any other media.  Twitter is beating out CNN and the local news as the place to hear about something first, and organizations are taking notice.  Gaining an extra 5-15 minutes of response time has huge benefits and can greatly impact outcomes for the better.

To see the Twitter analysis in Visual Command Center, contact us for a personal demo!

FEMA Flood Hazard Zones feed

We recently came across a WMS feed from FEMA that will display Flood Hazard Zones for all 50 states in the U.S.  Since this feed can be very useful to some of our Visual Command Center (VCC) and Visual Fusion (VF) Customers we wanted to quick summarize how to bring this feed into an existing VCC or VF application.

You can add this feed to your VCC or VF application in one of the two following ways:

Option 1:
Add the feed to a Visual Fusion Data Links List in your SharePoint site. The GetCapabilities URL to the feed is:  http://hazards.fema.gov/wmsconnector/wmsconnector/Servlet/NFHL?REQUEST=GetCapabilities&SERVICE=WMS. We recommend you select the following two layers (but you can make whatever selections you like): “Flood Hazard Zones (General)”  and “Flood Hazard Zones Boundaries”.  

After that, go into Composer and bring this feed into your application.  Once added, the feed will be shown in your application with two filters (or more if you selected more layers in the previous step), each corresponding to the two feeds you selected above:

Option 2

You can add this feed through the ad-hoc feeds menu by copying the above feed URL in the input box as shown below and then selecting “Flood Hazard Zones (General)”  and “Flood Hazard Zones Boundaries” in the subsequent step.  Note: with this option, the feed will be only visible to your local session.  If you want the feed to show up for all users of your application, go with Option 1 above.

If you have further questions, please feel free to drop us a line on our community site or to our support email.