Building Primary Wave

Osint Ltd is an international security and intelligence consultant offering reporting and monitoring services to the military, government and financial sector. They contacted NewRedo with the opportunity to create and develop a platform (Primary Wave) capable of storing and analysing threat reports to support their customer base.

As an intelligence consultant, I approached NewRedo to build me an intelligence platform that would enable me to log, display, and store intelligence reporting in an efficient and straightforward manner. I was immediately impressed with their service when I attended a “discovery day” to discuss my concept with Phill and Royd, who came up with some ideas for features that I never would have thought of myself.

As well as completing all aspects of the build that we agreed upon to an excellent standard (to the extent that a larger intelligence firm offered to buy the platform from me as soon as I demonstrated it to them), the team also found time to build in some extra ones on top.

The service was great throughout both the build, where Phil was regularly in touch with updates, and the aftercare where they were always on the end of the phone when I had any questions or queries. I would highly recommend NewRedo to any business looking for bespoke software.

Oliver Wright, Founder of Osint Ltd.

What NewRedo Delivered

It was of utmost importance for the system to include a visualization of events happening all over the world. Upon opening, the user is presented with a map featuring custom icons designed to illustrate different scenarios, from civil protests to armed conflicts. For example, events that are based on a photo being taken have a camera icon on the map. This makes it easier for the user to identify the main theme of each story without having to read it. Visualizing areas with a concentration of threats aids the analysis of possible future risks.

Key Features

• Real-time interactive map.
• Free text search.
• Geographical search.
• Date and time search.
• Search on different units of measure.
• Custom document structure for importing incident stories.
• Timeline feature used for trend analysis.
• Custom graphic design representing security incidents with unique icons.

How We Built It

The web application is built using Node.js and the Express.js framework as a server-side environment. The client-side of the application includes a dynamic and interactive user interface build with ReactJS. An interactive real-time slippy map using OpenSourceMap tiles showing all stories in the system. Stories are visualized with custom icons and pinned to the map using Leaflet. Data storage and search functionality used to perform queries using free-text, units of measure, time periods and geographical places are implemented using ElasticSearch. The system is hosted on a cloud server provided by Brightbox running Ubuntu Server.

List of Technologies Used

• ReactJS
• ElasticSearch
• Leaflet – library used for mapping.
• OpenStreetMap
• Node.js with Express.js
• Cloud Computing (Brightbox)