BigSee
Social Network Analysis (SNA)
danoviz.wordpress.com/2008/03/
You add entities and connect them together with lines. And that’s where many of the commercial products end. Sure it makes it a little easier to visualize networks, but it is hardly an accurate or sophisticated methodology for what visualization and analysis should be able to accomplish. Maybe you want to employ Social Network Analysis, and it certainly is a great tool for finding central players in a network. But both the etch-a-sketch and SNA routes aren’t going to yield accurate or comprehensive analysis unless the system takes metadata into account. Let’s assume you are visualizing a terrorist network. You have your three key bad guys and the various people, places, and things associated with them. Then you have some connections directly between the three key bad guys. Use the etch-a-sketch approach and you could manually lay out the graph to support just about any kind of hypothesis. Add SNA and automatic layouts and now you are starting to see actual meaning. But what if SNA identifies Bad Guy A as the most central node in the network? And what if Bad Guy A is dead? Dead guys are hardly the most central node in a network after they are dead.
Social Network Analysis (SNA)
danoviz.wordpress.com/2008/03/
You add entities and connect them together with lines. And that’s where many of the commercial products end. Sure it makes it a little easier to visualize networks, but it is hardly an accurate or sophisticated methodology for what visualization and analysis should be able to accomplish. Maybe you want to employ Social Network Analysis, and it certainly is a great tool for finding central players in a network. But both the etch-a-sketch and SNA routes aren’t going to yield accurate or comprehensive analysis unless the system takes metadata into account. Let’s assume you are visualizing a terrorist network. You have your three key bad guys and the various people, places, and things associated with them. Then you have some connections directly between the three key bad guys. Use the etch-a-sketch approach and you could manually lay out the graph to support just about any kind of hypothesis. Add SNA and automatic layouts and now you are starting to see actual meaning. But what if SNA identifies Bad Guy A as the most central node in the network? And what if Bad Guy A is dead? Dead guys are hardly the most central node in a network after they are dead.