In European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference, 2016.
Abstract—Intelligence analysts are at the forefront to provide decision makers with a greater picture of current situational context. Their main task is to identify relevant pieces of information from disparate systems and growing amounts of data while often lacking the appropriate tools. We propose a visual analytics approach to support analysts in monitoring and reasoning about the dynamics in a complex system. In our approach, we systematically map relations onto the user interface and support both overview and provenance over temporal dynamics. We further map explicitly otherwise tacit organisational knowledge. Our use case is based on a crime system taking the perspective of criminal network analysis tasks. Our analytics extract forceprioritised, weighted co-offender networks, which are represented through both a graph and a matrix visualisation, incorporating the evolution of relationships between offenders. The developed tools were evaluated in a study with domain experts, with the goal to assess tool utility and to investigate the appropriateness of the tool with the end user.
Keywords–Visualization of Networks; Graph; Time-varying Data; Adjacency Matrix; Evaluation