# GEWEL: GEoint Weaknesses Enumeration List ### 📍 Your Step-by-Step Guide to Geospatial OSINT Investigations 👉 This project will help you quickly understand how to use geospatial data to solve your problem. > [!example]+ Some GEWEL guides: > - [[How to find a place indoors]] > - [[How to find a place in a city]] > - [[How to find a place in nature]] ❓What is "weakness" in GEOINT (GEOspatial INTelligence) context? We call something a weakness in GEOINT when we talk about circumstances dictated by natural or anthropogenic causes and allowing more information to be harvested during the investigation or research process. There are three main terms: - **Objects (GEOL)** — a list of the types of objects that can be observed from a particular perspective - **Weaknesses (GEWEL)** — abstract principles, processes and conditions that allow more information to be harvested - **Techniques (GETL)** — specific actions, recommendations on what to do to obtain information You can find the corresponding folders in the left part of this website. ## How to use GEWEL 1. Use GEWEL to expand your understanding of GEOINT search techniques and vectors. Start with the list of weaknesses (GEWEL) and use the internal links to read more about the objects and recommended techniques. 2. Anyway, there are a number of objects in your GEOINT case. Use a list of objects (GEOL) to list and categorize them. Also use the OSM tags section of GEOL-n to compose your own query to the OSM database, see [[About#OSM Tags|OSM Tags]] for more information. 3. For more trivial cases, use the instructions section. The instructions allow you to see all the different techniques that can be applied to solve your case. You can go through the steps noting the techniques you used. ## Contributor guide Want to make a contribution? We have developed rules and structure, so please read them before creating a contribution request. Please note that GEWEL is not finished yet, so feel free to suggest edits if you doubt something or see an inconsistency somewhere. If there is a desire to contribute, add something or just talk - DM me in Telegram: [@dukera](https://t.me/dukera) ### GEWEL - **Example:** [[GEWEL-1. The Position of Celestial Bodies]]. The positions of celestial bodies and satellites at certain points in time are recorded by various open sources. The presence of such objects or objects indicating their location in a perspective can give a clue to its location. - **Name of entity:** The title should not overlap in meaning with existing titles and should briefly describe the conditions under which the information can be obtained - **Test description for new weaknesses:** Having X conditions allows you to harvest more information about the location. ### GETL - **Example:** [[GETL-4.1. Search for the Places Where this Language is Used]]. Identify the language in front of you and highlight the territories where it is used. - **Name of entity:** The title should summarize the essence of the technique you are describing - **Test description for new techniques:** To get more information about the location, apply the X tool/take action Y ### GEOL - **Example:** [[GEOL-2. Landform]]. Natural or anthropogenic land features on the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Landforms include hills, mountains, canyons, and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays, peninsulas, and seas, including submerged features such as mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes, and the great ocean basins. - **Name of entity:** The names of objects should combine all types of objects you want to cover. Each object must have at least one weakness. - **Test description for new objects:** One or more nouns describing a group of objects ## The idea After Soxoj published [SOWEL](https://publish.obsidian.md/soxoj-sowel/about), the idea arose that the entire OSINT methodology could be described through the notion of weaknesses. What does this mean? Every investigated system has weaknesses - conditions and principles that allow us to obtain additional information. In any investigation, we exploit the weaknesses of such systems, whether it is a photograph of a landscape or the functionality of a social media. In this sense, not only the SOCMINT category can be described in this way, but the other OSINT categories too: GEOINT, IMINT, FININT, etc. Of course, this division into categories is very conditional and in practice they are all parts of the OSINT, each having its own specificity. In practice, we see the connection between GEOINT and SOCMINT, for example, when we need to know where a photo posted on a social media profile was taken. Thus, the main idea is to create lists of weaknesses for each OSINT category by creating similar frameworks. # The value In our time of rapid growth of amount of different OSINT tools with corresponding difficulty in understanding what and how to use, it seems right to bring techniques and approaches to the foreground. GEWEL, as an attempt to make a such framework, techniques-oriented, allows you to create tools-agnostic standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your work in a universal language. For **OSINT practitioners**, the framework can serve as a support in the workflow as well as provide new techniques. For **OSINT trainers** it allows to build custom program based on scenarios and requests from participants taking into account their use cases. For **OSINT tools developers** techniques list could be used as a source of ideas: almost every entry reveals some principle which could be automated. For **OSINT researchers**, each weakness is an occasion for more detailed examination and subsequent characterization For **OSINT task creators**, techniques are elements of the task skeleton on which the plot hangs. # Methodology #### What is GEOINT GEOINT or geospatial intelligence is one of the OSINT categories, a methodology and process aimed at finding and analyzing information about the activities of an object on Earth or another planet, performed as a result of analyzing images with geospatial information. Each element in a photo has a meaning and a reason for being in the frame, so each element, by its attributes, reveals an area or areas on Earth where the photo may have been taken. The more such elements there are, the more we narrow down the search area, the easier it becomes for us to search. GEOINT should not be confused with IMINT. IMINT is the analysis of an image in order to extract some data from it that can already be used, for example, for GEOINT purposes. Thus, when we analyze a photo, we apply IMINT to get information about the objects in the photo or about the photo itself, and then we use the extracted data within the framework of GEOINT and search for the place where the photo was taken. #### OSM Tags Objects on the [Open Street Map (OSM)](https://www.openstreetmap.org/) are described by [tags](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags), each of which has a key=value structure and is based on the characteristics of the object. Thus, we can retrieve specific objects from the OSM database by filtering and refining the requested data with the necessary tags. [Overpass Turbo](https://overpass-turbo.eu/) ([Overpass Ultra](https://overpass-ultra.trailsta.sh/)) is a tool that allows us to search and retrieve objects from the OSM database using [Overpass QL (Query Language)](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL). > [!info] > For more on Overpass Turbo, read [[How to Use Overpass Turbo]] Each GEOL-n has a list of OSM keys that you may need if your case contains that type of object. Each key in the table: - has a description in English, taken from the [OSM Wiki](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page) - has a link to the Taginfo map, which shows the distribution of this key by country - has a link to a list of Taginfo values that are used with this key - has up to 3 of the most common values that are used with this key It is also worth noting that these are not all keys. The keys were selected and categorized according to the following features: - the number of uses exceeds 10000 - have a description in English - have a page on OSM Wiki - are distributed in more than one country The key you need may not be on the list. For more specific cases, use [Taginfo](https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/) search. #### Entities ```mermaid erDiagram Technique ||--|| Object : related Weakness ||--|| Object : related Weakness ||--|{ Technique : implies Instruction ||--o{ Technique : includes Instruction ||--o{ Hypothesis : includes ``` #### Types of weaknesses and techniques (reasons) - Natural - natural processes in nature - Cultural - cultural peculiarities of human life activity - Technical - technical and material side of human life activity