Hypertext structures for investigative teams

Abstract

Investigations such as police investigations, intelligence analysis, and investigative journalism involves a number of complex knowledge management tasks. Investigative teams collect, process, and analyze information related to a specific target to create products that can be disseminated to their customers. This paper presents a novel hypertext-based tool that supports a human-centered, target-centric model for investigative teams. The model divides investigative tasks into five overall processes: acquisition, synthesis, sense-making, dissemination, and cooperation. The developed tool provides more comprehensive support for synthesis and sense-making tasks than existing tools.Policing (e.g., [1,10,14]). Many models have been developed over the years, ranging from reactive community and problemoriented policing models to the more proactive intelligence-led and terror-oriented (i.e., political) policing models. These models run in parallel to the traditional law enforcement model characterized by its paramilitary and bureaucratic "command and control" structure, and focus on incident-driven response to calls for service. Police investigations include a variety of tasks like criminal profiling, crime scene analysis, data processing, and storing and sharing of information. Most information produced by police officers is difficult to represent and thus to access and communicate due to its nature. Police knowledge tends to be implicit and experience-based.Counterterrorism (e.g., [7,8,32]). Before 9/11 (2001), investigations were mainly handled by a nations security services, but are now moving towards joint operations with police in what is often referred to as the emerging policing-security nexus. Counterterrorism investigations are, like many of their targets, covert operations. The goal is to transform intelligence from different sources (humans, signals, images, open, etc.) into actionable intelligence products, typically for governments to take proactive measures in order to thwart high risk plots. Due to the

CrimeFighter Investigator: Integrating synthesis and sense-making for criminal network investigation

“…Based on a specific target-centric model for intelligence analysis [12], we propose a generic process model for human-centered, target-centric criminal network investigation [13,14] in Figure 1.…”

“…At the center is a shared information space. Spatial hypertext research has inspired the features of the shared information space including the support of investigation history [13]. The view concept provides investigators with different perspectives on the information in the space and provides alternative interaction options with information (hierarchical view to the left; spatial view at the center; algorithm output view to the right).…”

“…Finally, a structural parser assists the investigators by relating otherwise unrelated information in different ways, either based on the entities themselves or by applying algorithms to analyze them. In the following, core CrimeFighter Investigator features are presented, but unfortunately space limitations mean that details are limited and not all supported features can be presented (see [13,14,[25][26][27] for more details).…”

“…This work is based on previous publications by the authors in hypertext and security informatics conference proceedings [13,14,25]. …”

Journalism Design: The NewsCube, Interactive Technologies and Practice

“…Many studies of journalistic hypertext tackle the issue from a content perspective, with content analysis a common technique (Beyers, 2006;Dimitrova & Neznanski, 2006;Dimitrova, Connolly-Ahern, Williams, Kaid, & Reid, 2003;Larrondo Ureta, 2011;Tremayne, 2004; (Jackson, 1995;Joyce, 1987;Moulthrop, 1995) and built authoring systems and tools (Bernstein, 2003;Bolter & Joyce, 1987;Marshall, Halasz, Rogers, & Janssen, 1991;Marshall, Shipman, & Coombs, 1994;Petersen & Wiil, 2011;Pohl & Purgathofer, 2000;Shipman, Hsieh, Maloor, & Moore, 2001;Subašić, Berendt, & Trumper, 2011 Answering such questions will need a methodological approach that focuses not on content, but on design.…”