Horizon scanning of Chinese data sources

Horizon scanning aims to broadly capture the current research conducted by various research organizations. It embraces scientific advances from both defence research and civilian research of technological developments that may have significant implications for future military capabilities within a time horizon of 10-25 years. The findings can support the strategic planning of the Swedish Armed Forces and the direction of research of the Swedish Defence Research Agency. In 2016, the subject for horizon scanning has been Chinese scientific literature in the field of urban warfare. As data source, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) has been used. CNKI contains about 90% of all Chinese scientific journals. Scientometrics are based on keywords, citations, author and other Meta information of articles and is used in this work as the method to identify technologies and concepts that strongly increases in interest. Particularly, the method Known keywords has been used as method for the horizon scanning. In this report, a framework is developed in order to scan large amounts of data and to analyse and present the results. The framework is based on algorithms that can analyse text contents and by extracting information the text can be classified. This was necessary since the vast majority of the Chinese contributions were missing descriptive keywords. The purpose of the report is to document the development of the framework. This development constitutes the first step in the automated process that eventually will be implemented. The vision for the future horizon scanning framework is a fully automatic first phase, to be followed by a semi-automatic phase, and finally a manual phase. As more and more manual intervention is introduced, the amount of data is diminished, to end up in the last phase with about 100 scientific contributions, manageable for technical experts to analyse. As a result from the horizon scanning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), miniature UAVs, micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), wall-penetrating radars, and guided-weapons platforms were identified as technologies that attracted the most interest. These techniques are all relatively mature research. Nevertheless, they are vital for urban operations with ongoing development to create better functionality are still occurring. In addition to the horizon scanning results, several experiences from scanning of Chinese literature could be drawn. There was a series of practical problems; the connection to the Chinese databases and the downloading of Chinese contributions encountered technical issues. Another lesson was that the concept of urban warfare does not seem to be an established military tactical term in China. Several of the contributions referred mainly to the development in Western countries, primarily in the United States. It was also very valuable with access to personnel with knowledge in Chinese language in the various phases of the horizon scanning.