Intellishare was a lightweight browser based application. It provided searching and basic visualisations across data held in an i2 data repository; in this case i2 iBase.

I can remember when Intellishare was first released. It was the brainchild of some very clever people in the i2 consultancy team. ‘IBase Web’ as it was called then was trialled in Hertfordshire Police here in the UK, before being made available as the product known as Intellishare.

Intellishare became incredibly popular with the i2 community, with its easy to use web-based interface and straightforward deployment model. Its find and explore module gave access to valuable data sitting within an iBase database. While its data entry module, meant that real time information could be captured by front line staff.

Software Withdrawal

In September 2019 Intellishare was withdrawn and support was discontinued for Intellishare. While this was understandable, as a lot of the supporting frameworks were now themselves out of date, this left Intellishare users with some limited options.

Introducing VA Insight Portal

The VA Insight Portal ™ is a modern, 3-tier architecture, browser-based solution allowing users to streamline data collection and to view tactical visualisations while on the go. It offers a simple, cost-effective deployment model that compliments an existing i2 environment.

S-branch have had the opportunity to thoroughly test the latest release of the VA Insight Portal and to share our user experience directly with the Insight development team. Our client base has felt the hole left by Intellishare being discontinued. We feel that VA Insight fills that hole nicely!

We deployed the VA Insight Portal™ on a range of our test SQL source databases. In this blog, we will share our user experience with the platform:

Dashboards

The team at S-branch were very excited to see dashboards in VA Insight. It’s too often that product demos of i2 start with a single entity, a target person or phone for example. The real problem is often identifying that target, which then gives a start point to begin an investigation.

The dashboards are basic, don’t expect a full business intelligence suite like PowerBI or Cognos. However, for getting a “lie of the land” it works well.

Entities and Links

Entities and links can be searched, either by a basic or advanced search. The record view shows a basic visualisation and all the record details in one easy to read screen. One feature that we loved was the export functionality. It allowed a pdf of the record to be created with a visualisation attached; a really nice touch.

As of today, there is no expand function (that you would find in iBase). It is possible to drill down into an entity by clicking on it, this will open up that entity and show its visualisation. We think this is fine for the use cases that VA Insight is targeted at. Hardcore analyst’s will be still using the back office i2 suite, while front line staff will be accessing the data through the easier to use VA Insight.

Queries

We were impressed that VA Insight came with its own visual query builder. We were even more impressed that it supports parameterised queries, such as @#NOWDATE. While this is actually an improvement to the functionality within Intellishare, it should be noted that queries can be made diretly within the source SQL  database and then made available to VA Insight.

Data Entry

VA Insight supports data entry through its entities and links, its visualisation screen and through custom forms. We like the flexibility this brings, and we found the data entry to be intuitive.

Summary

In summary we found the VA Insight Portal™ to be an excellent alternative for IBM i2 Intellishare users. While not a direct replacement, it offers intuitive workflows, increased functionality and it is complimentary to most clients existing infrastructure.

There are other options available to address the hole that was left behind by Intellishare. However, we feel that this is the most appropriate in regard to technology used, the deployment time and importantly the price.

If you’re looking for an Intellishare replacement, looking into i2 or you’re looking into data analysis tools in general; please feel free to contact us.

Who are the MIBI?

The Motor Insurer’s Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) protect victims of road traffic accidents caused by uninsured or unidentified vehicles, in the Republic of Ireland and within the Green Card System of countries including the UK.

The MIBI is an interesting i2 use case for many reasons. In some ways, there is an element of fraud in almost all of their cases. If someone is hit by an uninsured driver, then someone in that story is defrauding someone or even worse committing a crime in some way.

A lot of the time the MIBI only gets one side of the story, this means they rely on their skilled fraud team and i2 deployment to assist them with their investigations.

Suspicious Cases

The MIBI offers a vital service to victims of accidents involving uninsured vehicles. They are also unfortunately the target of fraud.

Remember, there is an element of fraud to all MIBI cases really. So, the MIBI likes to refer to these cases as suspicious cases. Again, the MIBI relies on its skilled team and i2 deployment to help identify these suspicious cases.

It seems the MIBI is good at this, as a number of their suspicions have ultimately led to cases being withdrawn or dismissed in court.

Why i2?

The lead driver behind the i2 deployment is Fraud Manager, Ken McKinlay. Ken has been working with i2 since 2011. He’d been introduced to i2 by the Gardai in a previous role, where he was working on a ring of fraudulent cases. Before i2 he was using flip charts to capture data which was obviously time-consuming.

Ken had some very clear requirements for the system:

• Needed to get up to speed quickly
• It needed to visualise both policy and claim data together as there will definitely be hidden connections there
• The system needed to be pro-active and let the analyst know when an item of interest came up

The MIBI i2 deployment

The MIBI i2 deployment relies on automated feeds from 2 main source systems: An internal case management system called PRESTO and InsuranceLink. InsuranceLink is an external source that insurers use to check the claims history for claimants. The IFB in the UK has something similar.

Automated feeds into i2 are nothing new. Why the MIBI i2 deployment is so special is their use of the i2 suite. The MIBI have really utilised every tool and feature available to them. In some cases, S-branch even developed enhancements so they could utilise the products further

Alerting

The MIBI have around 100 + alerts in their system. This emails them everyday with a list of claims that require looking at. These alerts evolve with the system and are created by the MIBI fraud team

Geospatial Analysis

The i2 deployment is integrated with the MIBI’s GIS mapping solution Esri. This allows the MIBI to Identify hotspots in their iBase data, easily create alerts from repetitive areas of claims or accidents and overlay routes of uninsured Irish cars involved in accidents so that they can be more easily visualised on the maps.

Queries

Queries are a standard feature of i2 iBase, MIBI has really embraced them. Previously queries were being made of the MIBI’s data using tools like crystal reports; making the task far more complex. The ability of the team to ask complex questions easily, ensures the i2 system is fluid and moves with the MIBI’s needs.

Weeding

In order to comply with GRPR deleting or weeding data from i2 in an automated fashion was a necessity. Although i2 iBase didn’t do this out of the box, S-branch assisted in automating this process saving valuable time and preventing mistakes.

Smart Matching

S-branch also implemented some enhanced matching functionality to identify potentially matching claims. Again, i2 iBase didn’t do this out of the box but S-branch assisted in automating this process.

Searching

The MIBI makes use of all the searching tools available in i2. While this is standard usage the team feedback that searching their data has never been easier

Visualisation

i2’s strong point has always been visualisation. The ability to query a particular policy or claim and see all related information instantly in an easy to understand format is invaluable. i2’s ability to draw attention to potentially unseen connections has also proved useful.

The Outcome

Ken uses the word ‘enjoyed’ when he talks about the i2 deployment. The initial deployment was made in around 11 days. Although the initial implementation didn’t include all the features mentioned above, it met the core requirements detailed by Ken.

The beauty of i2 is that the iBase database schema is completely tailored to their needs. MIBI made the decision to keep their schema simple to assist quick analysis. This decision was a good one and it has lead to the MIBI having a very clean, clear i2 deployment that evolves with their needs.

If any of the above could benefit your i2 deployment, you’re looking into i2 or you’re looking into data analysis tools in general; please feel free to contact us.

Introduction

In April last year, S-branch embarked on a project to assist TRAFFIC in building an open-access online portal of illegal wildlife trade data. TRAFFIC is a leading non-governmental organisation working globally on trade in wild animals and plants in the context of both biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

The development of the portal took place thanks to the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, via the ReTTA project (Reducing Trade Threats to Africa’s wild species and ecosystems). The ReTTA project works to identify trends in illegal or unsustainable trade by processing wildlife trade data, sharing information and implementing systems to reduce threats to wildlife and ecosystems in Africa.

  “Information is power, and at ReTTA’s core is the drive to identify, understand and anticipate wildlife trade trends that could push African species over the edge”. Julian Rademeyer, ReTTA Project Leader in 2019

The Challenge

The illegal killing and trafficking of threatened wildlife species is one of the most urgent conservation issues of our time. Demand for illegal wildlife products and involvement from international criminal syndicates is impacting many charismatic African wild species. 

TRAFFIC wanted to enable external users to search their database of wildlife trade incidents to encourage information sharing and increase international collaboration. Law enforcement agencies, policy makers and researchers did not have access to TRAFFIC data and would regularly approach TRAFFIC to request information. An open-access Portal was required to increase ease of sharing of TRAFFIC’s wildlife trade data. In addition, users could filter the results or export them for further analysis and upload their own relevant data to supplement the information in the Portal.

The TRAFFIC team involved in the project were already proficient users of IBM i2 software, using Analyst’s Notebook and iBase to track illegal wildlife trade incidents, so it made sense to use iBase as the backbone of the solution. S-branch presented a well-thought-out and comprehensive tender application based on their i2 expertise and experience and were, therefore, a natural fit to scope, develop, test and deploy the Portal.

The Solution

S-branch met with Antony Bagott – Database Manager – and other members of his team in a series of workshops to determine the project requirements. TRAFFIC already had a wealth of data in their i2 iBase database that they wanted to share with other organisations, and allow those organisations to add to the data store. The alternative: establishing sharing agreements takes time and had proven to be a barrier to collaboration. It was decided that the Portal would allow users to query the database quickly and easily to find relevant data. The user interface needed to be intuitive and easy to navigate with no need for prior training. Finally, the portal needed to be accessible by researchers, conservationists, NGOs and law enforcement in multiple countries across the globe.

Over the following weeks, the S-branch team designed and developed the portal, touching base regularly with the team at TRAFFIC and giving access to a small group of users for user acceptance testing through each phase of development. Most of the work was completed remotely but, remarkably, the S-branch team always seemed to find some excuse to be on-site at the TRAFFIC office on “Tea and Cake Wednesdays”.

 “It has been an absolute pleasure developing this portal for TRAFFIC. This is down to the continued momentum and effort that TRAFFIC has given from the initial workshops all the way to the final deployment. The work TRAFFIC does in combatting illegal wildlife trade and ensuring the sustainability of entire species is nothing short of heroic. The chance to assist them with this task in some way really resonated with the team at S-branch and we are honoured to have been asked. The completed portal is something that both TRAFFIC and S-branch are and should be proud of, we hope it will give many years of service to TRAFFIC and their worthy cause.” Keith Musson – Managing Director

The Outcome

The portal, designed and developed by S-branch, supports more efficient workflows and reduces duplication of work by providing data in a centralised, easily-accessible location. This allows stakeholders to build an understanding of trends in illegal wildlife trade, using clear visuals, automated dashboards and simple analytics. Giving access in this way to incident information supports the drive to identify, understand, anticipate and disrupt illegal wildlife trade trends. 

TRAFFIC expects that this collaborative approach of sharing data will provide core insights into illegal trade, finding previously undetected patterns in the data. Increased inter-organisational data sharing not only contributes to a solid body of evidence to guide conservation strategy effectively but also helps to reduce the silo effect caused by a lack of communication and support between organisations. Using the portal to stay one step ahead of the poachers, traffickers and highly-organised criminal syndicates, TRAFFIC and their partners will continue to work to ensure that illegal wildlife trade is identified, prevented, and prosecuted at every opportunity. 

 “S-branch have worked tirelessly to design and implement an online portal that distributes and showcases our wildlife trade data to conservationists, researchers, NGOs and law enforcement. The portal, fed directly from our existing IBM i2 iBase database, is everything we asked for and more. Keith and Ollie were a veritable powerhouse of talent, creativity and professionalism throughout the project, and have been a constant source of expertise in developing our current systems. It has been an absolute pleasure working with such reliable and trustworthy people – we look forward to calling upon their skills again in future.” Antony Bagott – Database Manager 

To access the portal, please go to www.wildlifetradeportal.org and register an account.

For more information on TRAFFIC visit their website or contact S-branch. If you’d like to find out more about visual analysis software, bespoke portals, i2 or i2 based portals then feel free to call.

The ability to quickly and easily import data into IBM i2 iBase is why it remains popular today. Our clients like that you can import from databases, flat files or Microsoft Excel.

A few of our clients have reported that they were no longer able to import from Microsoft Excel. This usually coincided with the installation of 64bit Office.

When trying to import from an Excel Spreadsheet the user is presented with the following error:

The answer for a lot of our clients has been to save the excel file as a csv. This can create problems with automation and adds time to a process that used to be straightforward.

iBase Release Notes

The release notes state:

“Microsoft Office 64-bit compatibility issues

If you are using Microsoft Office, Microsoft recommends that you use 32-bit Office on 64-bit machines for compatibility with other products. If you install 64-bit Microsoft Office, the following actions are prohibited:

• Import from Microsoft Excel workbooks or Microsoft Access databases
• Report to Microsoft Access databases

However, the following actions are possible:

• Export to Microsoft Excel workbooks
• Report to Microsoft Word documents

On a 64-bit machine without Microsoft Office installed, you can install the 32-bit Microsoft Access Database engine. Installing the 32-bit Microsoft Access Database engine can help you import from Microsoft Excel workbooks and import/report with Microsoft Access databases. You might find the functionality useful for importing on servers.

Note: You cannot install the 32-bit engine if 64-bit Microsoft Office is installed.”

Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable

Some of the drivers iBase uses when importing, including Microsoft Jet and even OLEDDB, are a little old now. Microsoft’s appetite to support these hasn’t been huge. However, the following driver is available for the following operating systems: Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86), Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 3.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=13255

Installation details are on the link and are pretty easy. Once installed we were able to import from Excel Spreadsheets again as normal.

S-branch

We’ve been part of the i2 journey since 2006, either as trainers, technical consultants or marketers. Through these roles, we’ve worked with several police forces both in the UK and abroad, charities, insurance firms, law firms, government agencies, and commercial clients.

If you’re an i2 user and require technical expertise, please feel free to contact us

Paris attacks kill at least 128. That was the first news headline I read on my phone on the morning of November 14^th 2015. We had our flat in London at the time, it was a sunny day and we were just heading out for brunch at a local café.

I remember that day well, mainly because we had a friend who was visiting Paris. For the purpose of this blog let’s call this friend ‘Steve’. I quickly checked Steve’s Social Media accounts to see if he was safe; he had no posts since November 10^th 2015.

The news reports mentioned the Bataclan and ‘restaurants and bars at five other sites in Paris’. I had no idea where Steve was staying in Paris or indeed his plans for the evening before.

This event occurred when I was working with a commercial Social Media Monitoring platform. This meant I was able to monitor in real-time posts on social media. I decided to monitor keywords such as Paris, Attack, Bomb, Shooting, Shot etc. We then left the flat and I left the monitor running.

While we were at brunch, I checked my personal facebook and saw the following post from Steve:

Although relieved that Steve was safe 130 people lost their lives during the attack and 413 people were left injured.

After brunch we returned to the flat and I stopped the monitor. I’ve always kept the dataset I generated from that day, it’s a memory of my relief but also of how lucky Steve was.

SIREN – Investigative Intelligence Platform

One of the great things about S-branch, is being software agnostic. We’re not tied to a particular software vendor or piece of software. This means 2 things: the client always gets the best tool for their requirement and we get to play with lots of cool software!

The Siren Investigative Intelligence Platform is something we’ve been playing with for a while now. We’ve been impressed with the demonstrations and tutorials but we really wanted to try it with some real data; like the Paris Attacks data.

We’re not tied to a particular software vendor or piece of software. This means 2 things: the client always gets the best tool for their requirement and we get to play with lots of cool software!

Accessing the data was quick. Siren can analyse data from REST Services, JDBC Data Sources or flat files such as CSV. The ability to use JDBC means that with the correct driver you can connect to pretty much any external database.

The Paris Attacks data was in CSV format. The loading process allowed us to easily perform transformations to the data. We only did some minor formatting transformations, such as splitting a field based on a comma and formatting dates.

Autoselect Most Relevant and Generate Dashboard

Once loaded it’s incredibly quick to start gleaming insights from the data. There were two features that we loved: Autoselect Most Relevant and Generate Dashboard.

These two processes took less than a minute to run and automates something which can take a long time to design and get right.

Autoselect Most Relevant analyses the fields from the data source and selects which ones contain the most relevant data for analysis. Generate Dashboard then takes these fields and generates a dashboard from them. These two processes took less than a minute to run and automates something which can take a long time to design and get right.

The finished dashboard gives a good idea of what was being mentioned along with where, when and who. This shows just how versatile and quick Siren can be with any sort of data.

Graph Explorer

Dashboards give a great overview of data. It allows analysts to quickly understand and drill down into large sets of data. Once areas of interest have been identified, analyst’s usually want to ‘look into the weeds’ of the data. One way to do this is to look at the rows of data, this can be time consuming and tedious. Another way is to use Graph Visualisations.

Siren has a relations auto-discovery wizard which is in a Beta state at the moment. As data modelling is something S-branch does on a daily basis we chose to do this manually.

Graph Visualisations require data modelling. This is the process where you model entities or nodes and relations or edges. Siren has a relations auto-discovery wizard which is in a Beta state at the moment. As data modelling is something S-branch does on a daily basis we chose to do this manually.

Once the data had been modelled it was then possible to visualise the results of the social media dashboard on the graph explorer. It is also possible to overlay this information alongside other data from other dashboards. In the example above the Paris Attacks data was narrowed down to posts geotagged within the Paris area. We can clearly see users retweeting the same message.

Summary

This exercise demonstrated to us how versatile Siren can be and how quickly you can glean insights from a set of data. Siren has recently announced the addition of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Anomaly Detection, meaning we could glean even more information from the data. We look forward to trying this out.

For more information on Siren visit their website or contact S-branch. If you’d like to find out more about visual analysis software, then feel free to call.

S-branch offers independent advice, meaning if Siren is not for you at this time, we can help you find the solution that is.