Monday, November 28, 2011

Reaction:Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization


This paper is a comprehensive visual abstraction of various facets associated with Investigative analysis of textual reports.The tool enumerated in this paper, per se, is not a substitute for investigative reporting, but can provide visual hints as to how to inter-relate and comprehend short textual information related to an investigation.
Four faced interactive and inter-communicative tool developed in Java View-model architecture could be broadly divided into two:
a.Text based components comprising of Text Views and Scatter Plots
b.Graphic based “entity-connected-components” comprising of Graph View and List Views
I would prefer to call the Text Views as a visual-one-dimensional component.  This scans the entities such as ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and provides visual rendering with different colors. Scatter Plots are two-dimensioned since text-wise occurrences of entities are picturized with the help of horizontal and vertical ‘axes’.  There is further value addition by visually positioning the occurrences.

Communication between the entities and their connectivity is visualized with different colours, different sizes, different bar-densities in Graph View and List View.  I would like to term this as a dynamic-dimension forming various end points of communication from textual-visuals.

Author has used a java based architecture which has event based messaging libraries.  XML tree structure finds a relevant mention in this paper.

Question:
Can we create a JML (Jigsaw Markup Language) with a defined XML-Schema so as to ensure standardization in furthering the research in this area?

Literature Survey:
During literature survey on internet, I found a presentation in .pdf format by Stefan Lorenz of Universitat des Saarlandes titled “Jigsaw: supporting investigative analysis through interactive visualization”.  It may be advantageous for readers to go through this presentation as an excellent supplementary material. (http://rw4.cs.uni-sb.de/teaching/va08/session2/jigsaw.pdf)

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