The software, which was developed by both Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, takes a look at archives from The New York Times and studies related data on the Internet in order to form predictions about what will happen next in certain parts of the world -- such as disease, violence and a large number of deaths.

The system's sources include The New York Times' archives from 1986-2007, DBpedia (the information in Wikipedia constructed using crowdsourcing), WordNet (helps software understand what words mean) and OpenCyc (provides a database of common knowledge).