[ddj] Fwd: Launch of Detective.io - Overview of new developments in SNA

[Jonathan Gray]

Congrats to Nicolas and J++ for launch of Detective.io!

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[...]

I take the liberty to revive it to shamelessly announce our new product,
Detective.io :) We were working last May on an investigation to map all
innovative energy projects in developing countries and couldn't find a
proper way to store the data. We tried Poderopedia Plug 'n Play but needed
more flexibility in the ontology (we had energy projects and products, for
instance, that didn't fit in the default one).

We therefore went ahead and designed our own product using Django and
Neo4j. The key feature is that any OWL ontology can be fed to the platform.
It then creates a new "investigation", i.e. a contribution interface to
input data as well as a dedicated front-end. We don't have network
visualizations yet but make use of the Neo4j magic with a graph search
feature.

In terms of philosophy, we made the radical decision to keep nodes distinct
from one investigation to the next. We realized that entities do not have
the same meaning in different contexts. In our first investigation, the
node "British Government" (type: Organization) symbolizes all British
public involvement in energy projects. If we were to investigate
relationships at 10 Downing Street, such a node would not be helpful.
Instead, we would have nodes for each department of the executive branch.

Feedback from experts like you would be immensely appreciated.

In other news, we witnessed the recent launch of a tool by investigative
journalists of the NGO OCCRP <http://vis.occrp.org/> that is very intuitive
to map connections when investigating criminals. It has no option to add
new types and no search feature. It will be open sourced soon.

Developed in Istanbul, GraphCommons <http://graphcommons.com/> is also
pretty intuitive, especially to share a map of nodes with collaborators.
However, it has no data mining feature and a very limited set of types.

Best wishes from Berlin,

Nicolas.
--
@nicolaskb ・0x2D40B8C5


-- 

Jonathan Gray

Director of Policy and Ideas  | *@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>*

The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>

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