Got data? Maybe you have too much data? IBM can help you with that.
When people communicated mainly by face-to-face conversation, telephone and postal mail, the detective’s problem was generally with not having enough data. Phone taps required access to the twisted pair of wires physically attached to the target phone. A mail drop was just about impossible unless you were a fed, and difficult even then.
Today, we are swimming in data. There is far more business communication over email than with the postal service, additional messaging — text and photos — sent over mobile phones and traffic on social network sites. The good news is that there is nearly always a data trail left with these communications. The bad news is that there is simply too much data for any one person to make sense of it.
Enter i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis (EIA) from IBM. i2 was around for many years as an independent company before it was acquired by IBM. It was then, and is now, the gold standard for analyzing and visualizing large data sets.
Before everyone had a PC on their desk — or in their pocket — investigators laid out the persons of interest, addresses, phones, and other data points on corkboards, sometimes with colored yarn running between the index cards that carried each item. This worked well enough with maybe 30 data items, but eventually, you started looking for a bigger corkboard. There was also the problem that these very large charts had to be covered any time a witness or suspect might be able to see them, and space is usually valuable in police stations.
In its simplest use, IBM i2 EIA takes all of the data points available and creates a “cloud,” with connectors leading to and from every data point that is somehow associated with another. For example, email records might show that John Doe contacted more than 200 people over a year. IBM i2 EIA will display all of the email addresses associated with John’s account, with highlighted connectors displaying the most contacted ones.
If a warrant is obtained for some or all of the accounts associated with John’s email, connectors will run from any of John’s associates who contact each other. The same process works for a variety of other sources such as physical addresses, car license plate numbers, social media accounts, and any other type of data you can name.
This cloud of data points and connectors can get very large and confusing, and this is where i2 EIA proves its worth. The user can zoom in on any portion of the cloud and see the data points of interest at that moment, or tell the software to hide all the data points except those pertaining to any subset of the data.
The size of the datasets is not a problem for i2 EIA. The software can handle multi-petabyte size datasets, with search times of under five seconds. Your laptop computer probably has a hard drive of around 500 GB — a petabyte is 2,000 of those.
IBM i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis can also consume unstructured data. The software can analyze a dataset like this and suggest categories or classifications for the information it extracts. That allows the unstructured data to become structured and thus, compatible, with the better-refined points in the data set. This feature can also be used to analyze spatial data, tagging data points with the locations where they occurred or were observed.
Steve Dalzell, the Principal Offering Manager for the IBM Safer Planet Intelligence Analysis Portfolio, said, “Standard analytics chop and slice that data down. This allows users to go quickly from data to decision.”
Many of the changes in IBM i2 EIA affect the user interface and ease of use. “We’ve reduced the number of clicks per outcome,” Dalzell told Police1. “A task that used to require seven clicks of the mouse is now down to one.”
Another improvement is in the way the user can see the data cloud. With a data set containing thousands or millions of points, zooming out to see the entire set made it appear to be a dense ball of string on a standard computer display. The new version can support up to eight high-resolution displays, making it possible to better visualize relationships.
Sometimes you know that two data points are related, but it’s difficult to see the relationship because of all the relationships in between. Dalzell compared it to the trivia game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where an actor in a movie is linked with another, that actor linked with another movie, and so on until you get to one who has been in a movie with Kevin Bacon. When trying to see such relationships in IBM i2 EIA, the software will show the shortest path between two data points, simplifying the visualization.
Each data point is associated with an icon, showing what kind of information it represents — an address, a name, a business, a telephone number, etc., and there are more icons available than any user is likely to need. Isolating the relevant data points in a simplified display makes it more evident where the “gatekeeper” points — those from which many other data points connect — reside in the dataset.
“Another feature is the ability to access the analysis from a web browser. The connection summary shows the connections with any one data point, with the analysis done on the server, not on the client,” Dalzell said.
Dalzell went on to say, “IBM i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis allows agencies to practice intelligence-led policing, providing leads for investigations more quickly and readily than has been possible. The technology integrates easily with COPLINK, another service in IBM’s Safer Planet portfolio, allowing investigators the ability to have immediate access to analyses and data generated by patrol officers, almost in real-time.”
