Contents

01 · Gather

Building the picture

Everything begins with an area of interest and the layers you pull into it. VALIS keeps collection and analysis separate from the feeds themselves, so adding data never means changing code.

Set your area

Type a place, a lat/lon pair, or an MGRS reference into the search box; VALIS resolves it to a bounding box and flies you there. The AOI chip beside the search box shows where you are. This AOI is the lens for everything that follows: collection, analysis, offline bundles, and watches all key off it.

Pull in layers

The Data Layers panel lists every feed your team is granted — aircraft (live ADS-B), vessels (AIS), earthquakes, weather, transit, infrastructure and more, plus any admin-defined feeds. Toggle a layer on and press Collect over your AOI; entities land on the map, graded for reliability, and are shared with your whole team instantly.

02 · Understand

Making sense of it

A map full of dots is data, not intelligence. VALIS’s analysis tools turn what is there into what it means — and every one is deterministic: given the same data it gives the same answer, and it can always show its working. That is what makes the output defensible.

Information ages — and the map shows it

A track fix from forty minutes ago is not worth the same as one from forty seconds ago, and VALIS treats it that way. Each contact’s confidence decays with age at a rate tuned to its type, and stale entities visibly fade on the map. The underlying record is never altered; you’re simply shown, honestly, how much to trust each mark right now.

03 · Read

Reading documents — who, when & what

Much of intelligence arrives as text — reports, messages, transcripts. VALIS’s Dossier reads a document’s content and pulls out the entities that matter, turning prose into structured, mappable, linkable intelligence: coordinates and grids, people, organisations, dates, money, comms identifiers and case references — each with a confidence score.

Paste text or drop a .txt, .docx or .pdf. Every extraction is highlighted in the source — click any entity and VALIS jumps to it in the text, so you verify each finding in context before trusting it. One button adds everything to the link graph, already connected as a co-occurrence network.

Fully offline, no AI model, no black box

This is the part that matters most, and it is a deliberate design choice. The Dossier runs on deterministic rules, not a machine-learning model — there is nothing to download, no network call, and the same text always yields the same result. That single decision buys you three things a large language model cannot give an intelligence analyst:

It is also deliberately precision-biased: it would rather miss a weak candidate than clutter your graph with false ones, so low-confidence catches are clearly marked for your judgement rather than presented as fact. The result is document intelligence you can put in front of a decision-maker and defend line by line — the same standard the rest of VALIS holds itself to.

04 · Rigour

Staying honest and unbiased

The hardest part of the job isn’t finding data — it’s not fooling yourself. VALIS builds the discipline of structured analysis into the tool, so your assessment is the product of a method, not a hunch.

05 · Vigilance

Standing watch while you work

You can’t stare at every feed forever. Watchlists and tripwires turn VALIS from something you pull answers from into something that tells you when the situation changes.

Hits arrive live at the alert bell — no polling, no refreshing — shared with your whole team. Acknowledge them, jump to the entity, or fire them onward via a secure webhook.

06 · Decide

The target package

Analysis that stays on your screen helps no one. VALIS assembles your work into a structured intelligence product — an INTSUM model and a briefing deck — that a decision-maker can act on, with the evidence graded and traceable beneath every line.

Every element traces back: an indicator to its contributing entities, an entity to its source and Admiralty grade, an assessment to the notebook entries and ACH matrix behind it. The package carries the proof of why, so the audit trail survives later scrutiny.

07 · Together

Working as a team, at the speed of the problem

Intelligence is a team sport, and VALIS is built around that from the ground up. The unit of collaboration is the workspace — a shared compartment where a team sees the same picture, in real time, with strict isolation from other teams.

Deconfliction: open any entity and see who on your team has touched it and when — plus a privacy-preserving hint if another team is working the same object, so two desks don’t unknowingly duplicate a target.

Tags and links made by anyone in the workspace appear on your screen — a teammate at the next desk, or an analyst at a partner headquarters on the other side of a federated link. You do not have to reload or ask; the link graph fills in as their work arrives.

08 · Resilience

Offline and in the field

The environments where intelligence matters most are exactly where connectivity fails. VALIS is designed to keep working when the link drops — and to reconcile cleanly when it returns.

Take it offline before you lose signal: your AOI, movement history, your team’s tags, links and investigations, plus the basemap, cache into the browser. Then work as normal — the analysis engines run right in the browser. Sync when you can: one action pushes your work up and pulls teammates’ changes down, idempotently, with clean conflict review.

09 · Your GIS

Your own GIS — ArcGIS inside

Many organisations already run an ESRI ArcGIS server on their own network — with authoritative basemaps, a proper road network, high-resolution elevation and years of internal datasets. VALIS can plug straight into it and use it as the engine behind the map. Nothing to install on your desk: an administrator points VALIS at the server once, and the new capabilities simply light up.

The GIS Tools panel

A new GIS Tools entry appears in the tool rail whenever a local GIS is connected. It holds the extras: Buffer draws a precise geodesic ring around any point; Profile gives an elevation profile between two points, with climb statistics; Closest ranks the entities already on your map — hospitals, checkpoints, teams — by real road travel time from an incident you pick; Print asks the server to render a full-quality map of your AOI for a report or brief. Every result draws on the map and can be saved to the graph like any other analysis.

Your internal datasets as intelligence layers

Any feature layer published to your GIS — incidents, infrastructure, boundaries, plans — becomes a normal VALIS data layer: collect it over your AOI and it lands on the map graded and inspectable, flowing through the same correlation, fusion, tagging and reporting as every public feed. Your locator joins the search box too, so internal place names resolve first.

10 · Federate

Federation — many headquarters, one picture

Everything so far describes one VALIS site. But real intelligence organisations are not one site — they are fleets, coalitions, forward teams and headquarters, spread out and connected by links that are often slow, intermittent, or absent. Federation lets many independent VALIS headquarters (call them VALISHQ1, HQ2, HQ3…) work a problem together as if they were one system, while each remains a complete, self-sufficient VALIS in its own right.

Go dark for weeks — rejoin without losing a thing

A ship sailing out of coverage, a forward team on a dead link, a disconnected enclave — any site can drop off the network entirely for hours, days or weeks and keep working the whole time. This is submarine mode. When it reconnects, VALIS reconciles the divergent pictures with provably no data loss: nothing done in the dark is overwritten or discarded, and where two sites edited the same thing, both versions are preserved for an analyst to judge rather than silently resolved.

The important work comes back first

Bandwidth on a reconnecting link is precious, so VALIS reconciles in priority order: the analyst’s live work — investigations, assessments, watchlists, tags and links — flows first, so shared understanding returns within seconds. Bulk telemetry backfills quietly in the background as capacity allows.

What you see on screen

When your VALIS is federated, a small federation pill appears in the top bar. It answers, at a glance, the three questions you actually have:

When a partner’s work reaches you, VALIS tells you: a notification says “3 changes arrived from VALISHQ1”, the map refreshes, and the new contacts and tags appear in your link graph on their own. You never have to ask for a file, and you never have to wonder whether you have the latest picture — the digest settles it.

You can also press Sync at any time rather than waiting for the scheduler. Syncing both fetches your partners’ work and tells them to come and collect yours, so a change you have just made propagates immediately.

Going dark on purpose

A site can also cut its own link — the Go dark control on the pill. This is not the same as the offline mode described in chapter 08: that caches your browser’s work when you lose signal. Going dark takes the whole headquarters off the federation while it carries on working normally: your analysts keep collecting, tagging and assessing against your own database, and your site simply cannot be reached by partners — nor reach them.

11 · Protection

Protecting your intelligence

Intelligence that moves between sites and sits on machines in the field needs protection at every layer — not one lock, but several, so a single failure never hands an adversary the whole picture. VALIS encrypts in depth.

Protection that travels with the intelligence

The most important part: encryption doesn’t stop at your fence. Sensitive fields move between federated sites still encrypted, readable only by a site that has been granted the key — and that key is shared over the secure channel so that even a headquarters relaying the traffic in between cannot read it. Keys can be rotated without rewriting a single record, and a partner’s access can be revoked. It is the digital equivalent of a handling caveat that physically enforces itself — releasability preserved not by policy alone, but by mathematics.

12 · Interoperate

Agents, export & external systems

VALIS isn’t a walled garden. Through the Model Context Protocol, an AI agent can drive VALIS with the same toolset an analyst uses — search, collect, correlate, fuse, tag, link, watch, and assemble an intel summary — and, crucially, an agent is just another analyst: it authenticates and is authorised exactly like a human, confined to its workspaces, gated by the same grants, subject to the same rate limits, and fully audited. No privileged back door.

When the decision lives elsewhere, your workspace picture exports cleanly to STIX 2.1, MISP and KML — carrying only what you’re cleared to see, respecting handling caveats as it leaves, and recorded in the audit trail. A documented REST API serves non-AI integrations over the same authenticated, compartmented channel.

13 · End to end

A worked mission

Here is how the pieces fit on one problem — assess unusual maritime activity in a strait over the last week — from empty map to delivered package, across a federated task group.

Notice what carried through: a shared picture the team built together, deterministic analysis you can defend, reasoning captured as you went, and a product whose every claim is backed by graded, traceable evidence — produced in an afternoon, resilient to a dropped link, federated across sites, encrypted in depth, and open to automation under supervision.

14 · Reference

Quick reference

The top bar, left to right

The analyst’s loop

Collect → Correlate → Fuse → Test → Package — feeds and docs to the map, find links, raise indicators and warnings, ACH and notebook, then INTSUM and deck.