i2 Connect gateway

When you deploy i2 Analyze with the i2 Connect gateway, you gain the option to develop or purchase connectors that can acquire intelligence data from external sources. When a user of Analyst's Notebook Premium or the i2 Notebook web client makes a request to an external data source, the connector converts results from their original format into the entities, links, and properties of i2 Analyze records.

When i2 Analyze accesses data through a connector, the source is not modified. After the data is vetted and verified, and provided that the new or modified entities and links have compatible types, Analyst's Notebook Premium users can upload the records to an Information Store.

For each external data source, an organization can choose between setting up a connector to access the data in the external location, and ingesting the data into an Information Store. The choice depends on a number of factors, including the following considerations:

Availability: A connector is typically useful where a data source is constantly available. If a data source is not always available, ingestion to the Information Store provides users with constant access to a snapshot of the data.
Currency: If an external data source is updated very frequently, and it is desirable to have the most current data returned at each request, a connector can be used to achieve this. If regular refreshes are appropriate for the data, but moment-to-moment currency is not required, the data source could instead be ingested to the Information Store on a regular schedule.
Quantity: The Information Store is designed for high-volume data. However, an organization might not want to create a duplicate copy of a very large external data source that can be made available using a connector.
Terms of use: For reasons of security, privacy, or commercial interest, a third-party provider of data might not permit the organization to store a copy of the data source in their own environment. In this situation, a connector must be used to access the external data source.

For more information about how the i2 Connect gateway and connectors provide access to external data, see Connecting to external data sources. For examples of creating and deploying connectors, see the open-source project at https://github.com/i2group/Analyze-Connect.