Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Reaction: Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis Through Interactive Visualization

This paper discusses Jigsaw, a tool which visualizes the textual contents of the documents. Jigsaw attempts to highlight and communicate connections and relationships between entities in a report. The author proposes different perceptive visual forms like graph, tables, scatter view, text view etc. Jigsaw presents entity relations and links in easily perceivable form which helps an analyst to get a better and broader understanding of the events and facts documented in the reports. However, author agrees that Jigsaw is not a substitute for careful analysis of the reports, but it acts as a visual index which can be used as guide for further actions.

The usability analysis of Jigsaw needs to be evaluated. Especially, usefulness for the real analysts should be determined. Also, as the size of the document grows, the effectiveness of the tool may get impacted. For larger report collections, in which entities in a category grow to thousands or beyond, some sort of dynamic filtering could be required.

Overall, Jigsaw promises to be interesting tool for exploratory data analysis. However, more study needs to be performed on the effectiveness and scalability of the tool.

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