Editing Total Information Awareness (section)

====Genisys====
[[File:Genysis.gif|thumb|Graphic describing the goals of the Genysis project]]
Genisys aimed to develop technologies that would enable "ultra-large, all-source information repositories".<ref name="iaosite-genisys">{{cite web|url=http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Genisys.htm|title=Genisys|work=Information Awareness Office (official website)|access-date=2009-03-15|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090216080922/http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Genisys.htm|archive-date=2009-02-16}}</ref> Vast amounts of information were to be collected and analyzed, and the available [[database]] technology at the time was insufficient for storing and organizing such enormous quantities of data. So they developed techniques for virtual data aggregation to support effective analysis across heterogeneous databases, as well as unstructured public data sources, such as the [[World Wide Web]]. "Effective analysis across heterogenous databases" means the ability to take things from databases which are designed to store different types of data—such as a database containing criminal records, a phone call database and a foreign intelligence database. The Web is considered an "unstructured public data source" because it is publicly accessible and contains many different types of data—blogs, emails, records of visits to websites, etc.—all of which need to be analyzed and stored efficiently.<ref name="iaosite-genisys"/>

Another goal was to develop "a large, distributed system architecture for managing the huge volume of raw data input, analysis results, and feedback, that will result in a simpler, more flexible data store that performs well and allows us to retain important data indefinitely".<ref name="iaosite-genisys"/>