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Cogito semantic technology The material analyzed through the intelligence process is mostly unstructured: communications, conversations, data, news, etc., and rarely has an organized form, such as a database structure. As a consequence, the activities of analysis and processing can be highly resource consuming, and prone to error. The work of analysts and knowledge workers remains essential, and technology cannot fully replace it (and never will). Nevertheless, with new generation software based on semantic analysis, it is now possible to understand data automatically as well as to support reasoning and stimulate intuition.

Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) is a Java-based application for qualitative category-based content analysis. It serves two purposes: coding statements of actors into categories, and converting these structured data into networks that are readable by UCINET, visone and other network-analytic software packages. The software can extract either bipartite (affiliation) networks or adjacency networks. It is complementary to semantic network analysis applications because it neither relies on algorithms for automatic text processing, nor does it focus on the internal meaning or mental representation of a single text or document. Instead, tags are applied to the text data by manual inspection, thus rendering it more flexible, yet at the same time more work-intensive. DNA can be used to code a large body of text documents and then convert them into graphs. The application is currently being developed, tested and heavily used in my dissertation research project on German pension politics. Updates will be posted here as soon as something has been published. If you use DNA, I would love to hear from you about your project (if possible, via the DNA-help mailing list). For more information about the software, please consult the documentation or obtain a free copy from the download page.