Monday, November 28, 2011

Reaction: Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis Through Interactive Visualization

                This paper starts off rather ambiguously in defining the obstacles that this project aims to overcome and defining how the system works. They eventually move into more concrete detail as to how the system works and provide several examples of it. This software could be highly useful in situations as far ranging as counter-terrorism, to political dirt digging. Though nothing new is really presented in this paper, the organizational structure seems very clean and the interesting way of linking names through data sources is also of interest. I have not seen a structure like this before and wonder could this type of technique be used for determining plagiarism within research articles by finding links among authorships?

As a research tool, JigSaw could be potentially useful in extracting connections between gene regulations. Assuming as an entity, a gene called gene1, is mentioned in the same paper as gene2, and gene2 is mentioned in a second paper which mentions gene3. Suddenly gene1 and gene3 are linked. Most data mining software today that I have seen does not have the ability to link terms in such a distinctive, visually appealing, and informative way. If this software could be adapted to be used in this manner, gene regulatory networks might be developed more quickly with less need to read through every paper that even mentions a gene. This automatically would construct the links necessary for finding additional papers worth reading as well.

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