Document and Media Exploitation

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Document and Media Exploitation Mean?

Document and media exploitation (DOMEX) refers to the extraction, translation and analysis of physical and digital documents and media to generate useful and timely information. DOMEX is a very similar discipline to computer forensics or digital forensics but is aimed more at generating intelligence rather than evidence to be used in a court of law.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Document and Media Exploitation

The acronym DOMEX came from U.S. military activities and was quickly adopted by the U.S. intelligence community as a model for making sense of large amounts of unstructured, heterogeneous data.

An example could be as simple as determining whether a photograph has been digitally altered, or may involve something more nebulous, such as determining the likelihood that one person crossed paths with another on social media. DOMEX may even entail something as difficult as sifting through thousands of documents written in a foreign language in search of evidence of war crimes.

DOMEX is similar to other forensic sciences in terms of its information-diving, where data is examined in an attempt to sift out valuable information.

However, DOMEX differs in the breadth of the sources investigated and in the relative lack of precision of the conclusions that are made based on those sources. DOMEX investigations can include all types of electronic media above and beyond that of computer forensics and an acceptable end result can be something as simple as a hint or a trend – something that would not be acceptable in any court.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.