System Views
Jigsaw presents the individual reports in a document collection and the entities within those reports through a series of visualizations. We call these visualizations the system views. Below, we illustrate each view provided by the system and briefly describe their characteristics. Click on the individual images to see a larger version of the view.

All views share a Bookmarks menu which has commands to save any window and its state for resumption later. Also, in the upper right corner of a view is a small icon showing a satellite dish. This icon indicates that view is listening for system events and will update its presentation as new events occur. When the user clicks on this icon, a red line is drawn through it to indicates that the view is no longer listening to system events and thus will only change what is shown by direct interaction from the user. The icon is a toggle button so that clicking on it again will turn event listening back on.

Views in Jigsaw often show connections between entities across the document collection. Two entities are considered to be "connected" if they appear in at least one document together. Entities are considered more strongly connected as they appear in more and more documents together.

Control Panel - The Control Panel provides a variety of menu commands for use in the system and a search bar in which the user can enter strings to be searched, either as parts of entity names or as plain text in the documents. When a valid entity from the system is queried, all the visible views display that entity in the appropriate context of that view. When a plain text term is entered, all documents containing that term are loaded in the Document View. The Control Panel also displays the colors being used by the views to present the different types of entities.

Document View - The Document View presents a set of documents from the collection. A list of the loaded documents is shown to the left, and the one currently selected for viewing is highlighted in yellow (its text is shown to the right). Every time a document is viewed, a counter increments to help the analyst keep track of readings. All the documents with grayed-in clouds in the left list contribute toward the tag cloud at the top of the view which presents the key terms being mentioned across this set of documents. In the actual selected document view, named entities are colored in a background pastel shade of the entity color type shown in the Control Panel.

List View - The List View presents a set of lists of entities of different types. The user can add and remove lists through a menu command. Thus, a wider view window can support the display of more lists. At the top of each list are a set of buttons and a menu for controlling the appearance of the list. The menu allows the user to designate what entity type should be shown in that list. Note that the same entity type can be shown in multiple lists. Different buttons control features such as the justification of entities in the list (left, center, right) and the ordering of entities. Entities can be listed alphabetically, by frequency of appearance across the document collection, or by strength of connection to the selected entities (shown in yellow). The small black bars to the left of the entities indicate each entity's frequency of appearance across the collection as well.

When the user clicks on an entity, it is "selected" and shown with a yellow background. Multiple entities can be selected within and across lists using control-click and shift-click as well. When an item or items are selected, all of the other entities update their appearance. If an entity is not connected to any of the selected entities, it is shown in the default white background. Entities that are connected to at least one of the selected items are shown with an orange background. Stronger connections are indicated by darker shades of orange. In addition, connected items in neighboring lists can be joined by lines to further indicate individual connections. As a list becomes longer and longer, many items may ot be visible in the view. Consequently, a button is provided at the top of each list to bring all selected and connected items up to the top of the list.

Graph View - The Graph View presents documents and the entities within them through a traditional node-link graph visualization. Rather than drawing the entire document/entity collection through one graph layout, Jigsaw provides an interactive exploration-style Graph View. Documents are slightly larger white rectangles and entities are slightly smaller circles, colored by the entity type. The entities within a document are usually drawn as a cloud around the document in which they appear. An entity is only ever drawn once, however, so entities in multiple documents are indicated by one circle that is connected to different document circles. When the user searches for an entity or issues an entity display command, that entity is added to the view.

The view is interactive so that the user can click on any document or entity and drag it to a new location. Dragging a document brings with it all the entities only connected to it. (Entities connected to other documents as well retain their position during such a move, however.) Double-clicking on a document is a toggle-style display command that either shows or hides the entities connected to that document. Double-clicking on an entity displays all the different documents in which it appears.

When new entities are added to a crowded view, they may be positioned outside the current visible area, but the Jigsaw Graph View will automatically zoom out to make sure all are visible after the command. The Graph View also contains one special layout command, "Circular Layout", that will reposition all the items in the view. Documents are drawn at equally spaced positions around a large logical circle in the view. All the entities only appearing in one document are drawn outside the logical circle but near that document. Entities appearing in more than one document are drawn inside the circle. Entities appearing in the most documents are drawn closer to the center.

Scatterplot View - The Scatterplot View allows an analyst to place two different entity types on the two axes. Individual entities then can be filled in on the axes through search queries and interactive display commands. When a pairing of a plotted entity from the x axis and from a plotted entity on the y axis corresponds to a connection (ie, the two entities appear together in a document or documents), then a diamond is drawn at the crossing of their respective horizontal and vertical positions to represent that document containing both. The user can also assign particular colors to the different documents so that s/he can more easily see the different entity-entity pairings in a document. When an axis becomes crowded from too many entities being drawn on it, the user can use the two range sliders to narrow in on a particular region of the axis.

Calendar View - The Calendar View presents different documents and entities from the data set in the context of a familiar calendar view showing years, months, weeks and days. The small diamond items drawn on a particular day represent documents (gray) or entities (color mapping) in the context of the date(s) noted in document in which they appear. When the number of items associated with a day is too large to draw them all in that region, a number is drawn indicating how many others appear on that day. As the user moves the mouse over that day, a larger rectangle pops up and shows all the items. When the user moves a the mouse cursor over a document-representation diamond drawn in the calendar, all the entities appearing in that document are shown on the left.

Report Cluster View - The Report Cluster View represents all the documents in the collection, or some subset of the documents, as small circles. The user can drag and move individual documents or collections of documents to make different clusters. In addition, automated commands can be issued that partition the collection of circles into different clusters for things such as the documents viewed or not viewed so far, or all the documents either including or not including some entity.

Shoebox - The Shoebox is not really a document/entity view. Instead, it provides rudimentary evidence marshalling support. The user can add relevant entities and reports from other views to the Shoebox. These added items then can be distributed across different layers, combined to groups or hypotheses and linked together. Provided with those basic functions, the user can organize the collected evidence.

This research is supported by a grant from the Dept. of Homeland Security's NVAC Program and is one of a number of projects from the Southeastern Regional Visualization and Analytics Center.

Last modified: May 15, 2007