MERIDIAN™ Multi-Source Decision Platform

Ambiguity is the enemy. MERIDIAN is MGH Defence's principal multi-source analytical environment, presently deployed with six United Kingdom government customers and three allied ministries. The Analyst Workstation is at v4.2, released 9 December 2002, and is intended for the disagreeable but unavoidable business of deciding whether ten near-matching records are one subject, three subjects or a filing error that has been breeding quietly since 1997.

MERIDIAN's proposition is straightforward. It resolves entities across disconnected holdings, preserves the provenance of every field it joins, and shows the analyst why a merge was proposed. Confidence is published, contrary evidence is not hidden, and every assertion remains traceable to a source system, operator action or authorised import. It does not substitute machine certainty for professional judgement; it reduces clerical ambiguity to something a trained desk may examine in reasonable time.

Canonical sources and provenance

Each connector is registered separately, carries its own legal basis and retention period, and may be disabled without disturbing the remainder of the installation. Where a customer chooses, MERIDIAN will index only metadata and hold the originating record in the source system, so that an enquiry may be pursued without unnecessary copying.

• PNC and ANPR extracts, ingested on scheduled batches.
• Border movements from API and PNR holdings, with historic series from 1997.
• Companies House directorship, filing and shareholding material.
• Land Registry title and proprietor records against resolved addresses.
• Telecommunications call data records obtained under RIPA s.22.
• Vessel manifests and port state control records.
• SWIFT financial messaging via partner gateway.
• Open-source press and licensed news archives.
• SHOREBIRD™ tracks where the maritime picture is also in service.
• Client bulk upload for material MGH does not host and, in many cases, does not see.

For every merge, the workstation publishes the confidence score, the contributing fields and a plain-language reason string. An analyst may therefore ask, with some precision, "why did you join these two people?" and receive an answer more useful than a shrug from a machine room. That discipline is inherited from LATTICEWORK™, the underlying resolution engine, and carried forward into collection tasking through HALYARD™.

Audit log and show-your-working discipline

Every query is written to an immutable audit log against a warrant, authorisation or local reference number before the result set is returned. There is no supported administrative path that suppresses logging, no after-the-event edit facility and no private notebook held inside the application. Supervisors may review activity by desk, by user, by source or by authority; oversight bodies may export the whole record in documented form without requesting assistance from MGH.

A typical deployment

Download the MERIDIAN 4.2 datasheet (PDF, 640 Kb)

On-premises operation, keys and training

MERIDIAN is supplied on premises only. There is no hosted tenancy, no shared service and no evaluation instance exposed to the public Internet. Indices are encrypted with keys held by the customer, not by MGH; our engineers work on site under escort or against sanitised extracts provided for support. That arrangement is slower than the fashionable alternative and has proved, in our experience, considerably easier to defend in front of people who ask difficult questions for a living.

Standard deployment is twelve weeks from survey to acceptance: accreditation and cabling, connector configuration against the customer's legal bases, resolution tuning, then parallel running against the incumbent process. Analyst training is a five-day residential course, followed by a two-day supervisors' module covering adjudication queues, provenance review and audit inspection. Printed course binders remain available by first class post for organisations whose training rooms continue to distrust the projector.

MERIDIAN does not stand alone. LATTICEWORK™ provides the probabilistic linkage, HALYARD™ manages collection requirements raised from the workstation, and SHOREBIRD™ contributes maritime tracks where the customer operates a common picture. Together they form a serviceable chain from collection task to evidentially defensible query result.

Technical enquiries, capability briefings and requests for the printed product compendium should be addressed to defence@mgh.org.uk, or through Contact Us. Please do not transmit classified material by electronic mail.

Page last updated 3 March 2003.