what's new in i2 analyst's notebook 6.0.55 (uk)

What's New in i2 Analyst's Notebook 6.0.55

Issue 1 10 June 2005

Copyright © i2 Ltd 2005

Part Number: 0912

Copyright All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from i2 Limited. i2 considers this software product information to be accurate, and reserves the right to modify it without notice. The software product described in this document is licensed for use under a software license agreement.

Trademarks The i2 logo and Analyst’s Notebook are federally registered trademarks of i2 Limited.

Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Other products and services may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies and appear in this document for reference, and such reference is not intended to affect the authenticity of any trademark or service mark.

Warning and Disclaimer i2 provides this document "as is", without representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty concerning the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness of such information contained herein. i2 does not assume responsibility for the use or inability to use the software product as a result of providing this information.

The data presented in this document is fictitious and for illustration purposes only with no connection to, without limitation, past or present persons, organizations, identifying numbers, or circumstances, except by coincidence.

Issue 1 10 June 2005 Copyright © i2 Ltd 2005

What's New in i2 Analyst's Notebook 6.0.55 White Paper


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Contents Who should read this white paper? ........................................................................................... 4 What is i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55?...................................................................................... 4 What is power2?........................................................................................................................ 4 Benefits...................................................................................................................................... 5 What are the new features and enhancements?....................................................................... 6

Search Bar ............................................................................................................................. 6 Minimize Crossed Links Layout ............................................................................................. 7 Organization Layout............................................................................................................... 8 Highlight chart items .............................................................................................................. 9 Align or Space...................................................................................................................... 10 Semantic types..................................................................................................................... 11 Data records......................................................................................................................... 13 Powerful entity matching...................................................................................................... 14 Page Setup .......................................................................................................................... 16 Link Bar ................................................................................................................................ 17 Improved example report specifications .............................................................................. 18 New and updated icons ....................................................................................................... 19

How do I upgrade to i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55? ............................................................... 20 Is i2 ChartReader included? .................................................................................................... 20 Contact information.................................................................................................................. 21




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4 Who should read this white paper?

This white paper is intended for i2 Analyst's Notebook users familiar with version 6 who wish to learn about the new features available in version 6.0.55. Managers will also benefit from knowing about these features so that they can assign tasks more effectively to analysts.

What is i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55?

i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 is a maintenance release of i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0 that incorporates i2’s power2 technology including exciting new features and enhancements that benefit all users.

i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 also addresses many of the bugs reported since i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6 was initially released.

What is power2?

i2’s power2 technology contributes to a safer and more secure world by empowering analysts and investigators. i2’s innovative knowledge-based analysis, visualization and intelligent data access tools can help to develop actionable intelligence for use in the detection and prevention of unlawful activity.

power2 enables you to:

• spend less time finding data and more time analyzing results

• perform more intelligent searching, matching and analysis

• acquire data more conveniently and from additional sources

• extract maximum value from existing data

i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 plays a central role in bringing the power2 benefits to all analysts and investigators. However, the full benefits of power2 are attained when using i2 Analyst’s Notebook in conjunction with i2’s comprehensive suite of power2 enabled and compatible products such as i2 iBase and i2 iXa Framework, iBridge, i2 TextChart and i2 Chart Explorer.




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Benefits

The features provided and the benefits gained from i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 mean that this version is much more than a typical maintenance version.

• Powerful analysis

Apply powerful analysis with i2 Analyst’s Notebook’s increased intelligence and its sophisticated understanding of your data.

Identify and visualize hard to find matching or duplicate data using the advanced matching capabilities. Choose how you would like to to deal with duplicate data to ensure that all associations, transactions and relationships are clear and recognizable.

Control your whole investigative story by using data records to store background information from your data sources. Data records enable you to perform more informed and effective analysis.

• Become more productive

Save time searching your investigations for that critical piece of information by using the new simple-to-use search tool. Quickly search for any information stored within your chart.

Use the helpful highlight capability to bring to attention the results of your analysis no matter where the items lie on your chart.

Communicate your investigations more effectively by taking advantage of the new visualization features – helping you to better align your charts and ensure that they are automatically arranged in the style that provides the highest analytical value.

i2 Analyst’s Notebook’s combination of powerful and intuitive new features provide you, your team and your investigation with countless benefits.

Make Smarter Decisions - More Easily and More Quickly




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What are the new features and enhancements?

Search Bar

The Search Bar allows you to search through all of the information in your chart in one simple operation. It gives you easy access to your data whenever you need it.

Type in the word, phrase, number or date you are looking for and the Search Bar returns a list of all the items in the chart that match your request.

The Search Bar includes a close-up preview of each resulting item so that you can always locate your results no matter how large your chart is.




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Minimize Crossed Links Layout

You can use the Minimize Crossed Links layout to automatically reduce the number of links that cross.

Complex charts can conceal key associations beneath a confusion of crisscrossing links. The Minimize Crossed Links layout allows vital connections to be instantly revealed.




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8 Organization Layout

The Organization Layout allows you to discover association hierarchies within your investigation. You can select which of your chart items you would like to see at the head of your hierarchy, or allow the head item to be chosen automatically based on the link directions. Additionally, the Organization Layout will rearrange your chart with the minimum number of crossing links.

The Organization Layout helps you to reveal chains of command and helps you see the flow of information or commodities. The i2 Analyst’s Notebook layouts ensure that you have the best tools in order that you can concentrate your investigative resources in the most effective way.




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Highlight chart items

Locating and identifying the results of your analysis in heavily populated charts can be easier said than done. The highlighted results of your searches can get lost in the numerous chart items visible on your larger network charts. Zooming in on the selected items can prevent you from seeing their positions in the context of the whole chart.

1.

The Highlight command highlights the selected entities using an animated box that expands and contracts around them. The command is available from the View menu and also from the Display toolbar. Highlighted links flash them, ensuring that your attention is immediately drawn to all of your significant chart items.

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The Highlight command ensures that you never overlook the results of your analysis, regardless of how diverse the results are or how large your investigation is.

3.




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10 Align or Space

It is important to construct and present your charts as clearly as possible so that trends and associations are easy to see. The Align or Space toolbar provides you with additional tools to ensure that your chart items are perfectly aligned and uniformly spaced where necessary. This makes certain that your charts are crystal clear and professional in appearance which, in turn, helps you to view and interpret them more effectively.

The Align or Space toolbar saves you valuable time when producing your charts and allows you to more effectively present and communicate your investigations.

Here is a theme line with a set of event frames viewed prior to using the Align Horizontally command:

After using the Align Horizontally command the chart is instantly clearer and tidier with theme lines and their event frames in straight horizontal lines.




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Semantic types

Have you ever wanted to analyze or search only the people that are portrayed in your chart and not include the vehicles and locations associated with them? The new semantic type properties categorize the real world objects from your investigation allowing you to perform more ordered and targeted analysis.

All entities, links and attributes now have a semantic type property, where applicable, helping both you and the application to make more sense of your data. For example, Phones, Cell Phones, Pagers, Fax Machines and Telephone Boxes are actually just types of telephone that have been specialized for particular tasks and represented in i2 Analyst’s Notebook with distinct icons. These entities all have a semantic type derived from Phone. When searching for a telephone number on your chart you can easily broaden your searches to cover all types of telephones by selecting a semantic type of Phone.




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Semantic types are automatically assigned from the supplied chart templates but you can, of course, override the automatically assigned values and specify your own.

For example, you may choose to use a telephone number as the label of a house entity. By assigning a semantic type of Phone the analysis tools can treat this entity as a telephone rather than as a house.

Semantic types give you the flexibility to represent the key people and objects in your investigation in the clearest possible manner while retaining the power to intelligently analyze the information.




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Data records

When adding chart items from different electronic data sources there is typically much more valuable information available than just the label or name of the chart items. Sometimes you might choose to include that information in the description or as an attribute, but in many cases the additional information is only stored in the data source. Data records provide a convenient mechanism for storing and displaying additional properties from the data source with each chart item.

Data records are created and populated automatically by the electronic data sources supplying the information. For example, i2 iBase can be configured to automatically populate data records when building up your charts.

Data records are stored within the chart and can by viewed without requiring a connection to the original data source. For example, you can view the additional address details stored within your chart for a person that has been created from an i2 iBase database.

If necessary, you can easily remove the data records from your charts before you distribute them.

As well as being visible alongside the other chart item properties, data records are also used by the Search Bar and Find Matching Entities to provide a better set of results.




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14 Powerful entity matching

Identifying the critical and decisive information within an increasingly vast amount of data is one of the challenges facing analysts today. The information available often originates from disparate data sources of varying qualities including voice recordings, hand written statements, text files, Excel spreadsheets, internal and external databases, and online data sources. Most of this data has been entered or modified by different people at some time in its life.

All analysts will appreciate the types of inconsistencies in data quality from different data sources; different recordings of the same information, accidental spelling mistakes, different formats of the same information etc. One major outcome of these inconsistencies is that the same piece of information can be represented by different entities on a chart. This can mean that key associations are overlooked and vital leads unnoticed.

i2 Analyst’s Notebook includes a powerful tool called Find Matching Entities which identifies similar entities on a chart based on their labels. This tool can be used to overcome some of the problems associated with poor data quality and the inconsistencies experienced when incorporating data from disparate data sources.

Find Matching Entities has been enhanced in i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 with powerful new smart matching capabilities that better identify matching items within your charts. The existing capabilities of Find Matching Entities are based solely around the matching of labels and identities. The new smart matching capabilities use the labels, semantic types, attributes and data records to identify more accurate matches. Quite simply, the more information that is available, the better the matches identified.

The new Find Matching Entities includes a facility allowing you to look for duplicates by comparing a selection against the entities in the rest of the chart. This facility is of particular use after importing entities from a database or text file allowing you to see if the information imported already exists on the chart.

You can control the matching threshold allowing Find Matching Entities to identify both strongly and weakly matched items. The improved user interface shows you the items that have been identified as matches giving you the ability to review them and choose to merge, link, or leave them on the chart. To help you with your reviewing, Find Matching Entities indicates the strength of each match and lets you view the individual item properties. In addition you can interact with your chart to see the detailed context for the matching items, ensuring that you can quickly and easily review all the matches.




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The improved Find Matching Entities ensures that you have all the information and tools required to remove duplicates from your chart and ensure that significant associations are not missed or neglected.




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16 Page Setup

Being able to print your charts is a necessity and should be as straightforward a task as possible. The Page Setup dialog is simpler to use with graphical representations to help you quickly understand the available page setup and printing options.

When selecting your page setup options the chart immediately previews how the resulting pages will be used giving you the confidence to print successfully. This saves you time and effort when preparing your chart for printing.




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Link Bar

Adding links to your charts using the Link Bar has been made even more intuitive. A selection dialog from the Link Bar allows you to preview and choose the wiring height for your theme line segments.

The Link Bar saves you time by allowing you to quickly draw links on your chart. The new dialog helps to remove the trial and error from drawing diverting theme lines and allows you to easily choose the most appropriate representation for your sequence of events charts.

If you don’t have the Link Bar displayed, you can display it by selecting the View menu, choosing Toolbars and selecting Link Bar.




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18 Improved example report specifications

An improved selection of example reports is available to help you export chart information. The example reports provide a great way of getting the information visualized in your charts into other applications for further analysis or for reporting purposes.

Save time when reporting by either running the reports provided or by using them as the basis for creating custom reports.




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New and updated icons

The following icons have been added:

The US version of i2 Analyst’s Notebook contains icons representing the US states and territories.




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20 The flag icon representing Afghanistan has been updated since the previous maintenance release.

Military symbols, previously only available in the US version, are now available in all language versions.

How do I upgrade to i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55?

i2 Analyst's Notebook 6.0.55 replaces your previous i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0 installation. The installer helps you uninstall your previous version of i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0 before installing the latest version.

Is i2 ChartReader included?

The latest version of i2 ChartReader is included on the i2 Analyst’s Notebook 6.0.55 CD. i2 ChartReader is a freely distributable application that lets users view and print i2 Analyst’s Notebook charts.




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Contact information

If you need more information on i2 Analyst’s Notebook or any i2 product, please visit our website, www.i2group.com, or contact us at one of the following addresses:

i2 Ltd i2 Inc. The Visual Space Capital Park Fulbourn Cambridge CB1 5XH UK

6551 Loisdale Court Suite 600 Springfield VA 22150 USA

Phone +44 1223-728-600 Phone +1 703-921-0195 Toll free 888-546-5242 Fax +44 1223-728-601 Fax +1 703-921-0196 Email [email protected] Email [email protected]

i2 Inc. West Office i2 Inc. Canada Office 2150 River Plaza Drive Suite 320 Sacramento CA 95833 USA

555 Legget Drive Tower A, Suite 304 Kanata ON K2K 2X3 Canada

Phone +1 916-922-0269 Phone +1 613-271-2353 Fax +1 916-922-0293 Fax +1 613-271-2354 Email [email protected] Email [email protected]


what's new in i2 analyst's notebook 6.0.55 (uk)

Documents

smart matching capabilities

disparate data sources

find matching entities

i2 chartreader included

align horizontally command

i2 analysts notebook

data sources

page setup