Embodiments of the present invention are directed towards methods and apparatus for generating a common operating picture of an event based on the event-specific information extracted from data collected from a plurality of electronic information sources. In some embodiments, a method for generating a common operating picture of an event includes collecting data, comprising image data and textual data, from a plurality of electronic information sources, extracting information related to an event from the data, said extracted information comprising image descriptors, visual features, and categorization tags, by applying statistical analysis and semantic analysis, aligning the extracted information to generate aligned information, recognizing event-specific information for the event based on the aligned information, and generating a common operating picture of the event based on the event-specific information.