Monday, November 28, 2011

Reaction: Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization


The paper is a description of the concepts, implementation and evaluation of a tool called Jigsaw. Jigsaw is intended to help in investigative analysis of documents to uncover hidden plots. This is a very intensive task involving experts pondering over several documents to make connections and try to uncover plots. In order to assist the experts in such a task. The researchers have worked on a natural and simple visualizations of the documents being considered for a case.

The main application provides four views. Two are report based visualizations meaning they are mostly textual and are in context of the report. These are called the text view and the scatter view. In the text view the documents are shown with highlighted entities to focus on a specific region. The scatter view provides sliders to ponder over specific entities in a report and its connnections. There are two more graphical representations a list view and a semantic view. The list view provides a list of entities and the connections between them. The semantic view provides a graphical visualization of the entities and connections as nodes and links visualization. If an event occurs in one of the views (selection, etc) it is propogated to others. This can be turned off too to give user greater flexibility on what he wants to see on each screen.

This is a really great idea as it leaves the intelligence to the expert and attempts to just act as an aid in his work. However since it has a multiple views and all of them are equally important this concept can be used only in a elaborate multi-monitor setup

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