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.

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.

Come and meet us.

If you’re looking into visual analysis products, you will have certainly considered i2. If you’d like to hear a customer user case, then we’d suggest attending the IBM i2 and Brookcourt Solutions Threat and Counter Fraud Event, on 21^st February 2019.

We are speaking at the event with our partners Arquebus Solutions on Integrating Ballistic Intelligence – The Real Picture

IBM will be presenting valuable insights and knowledge on how to tackle Threat and Counter Fraud. S-branch was asked if it could give a real customer user case, showing how versatile i2 can be to tackle any kind of threat; in this case, the threat of firearms.

Arquebus provides specialised services and support to assist organisations enhance their response to firearms enabled crime and terrorism. With the support of S-branch, Arquebus has been deploying Firearm Focal Points (FFPs) to countries across Europe. FFPs are designed to collect all the necessary firearm information together, creating accurate investigative leads thereby helping both investigators and prosecutors to tackle the problem at source.

FFPs work because of data collaboration. Analysis of ballistic evidence has advanced hugely but this information should not be analysed on its own. If a cartridge case is found at a location what other crimes have we seen in that area? Were there any ‘shots fired’ call outs at that time? We may know that the cartridge case comes from a particular type of firearm. What intelligence do we have about trafficking those types of firearms? If we are lucky enough to find or have a match to a particular firearm; who is it registered to? Is there any link to other crimes?

We can only answer these questions if we have access to all the information. Analysis tools allow us to understand this information quickly, helping FFP’s provide accurate leads fast. S-branch will showcase how and why i2 was used to provide this functionality and discuss the results we have seen while deploying such a system.

Come see us at:

IBM i2 and Brookcourt Solutions Threat and Counter Fraud Event

Where: London

When: 21^st February 2019, 1pm to 4:30pm

Please email to register your attendance. See the full agenda here.

It’s no secret that i2® is a popular choice for visualising and analysing data. That’s why in 2011 IBM paid a rumoured $500 million to acquire the small British software company. Its flagship product: Analyst’s Notebook has now become the standard for charting data and is used in nearly all of the UK police forces. If you have a sporadic flow of data in formats that vary greatly, IBM i2 is still one of the most compelling tools on the market.

IBM i2® products have always worked well with structured data. This has given its users the ability to ‘bring to life’ data hidden in columns and rows. There are many other places that data can hide though and one of those places is in unstructured text.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured text can pose a challenge to analyse and understand, and we keep generating more of it every day. This text can be anywhere from documents, emails or social media posts. In March 2018 we wrote a blog detailing how data hidden in unstructured text can be utilised. It focussed on the use of Natural Language Processing and particularly Entity Extraction. You can read it here. That blog post concentrated on what could be done using freely available tools.

At the time we stated that there are many commercial offerings that offer that functionality but in a much slicker and easy to access interface. One of those tools is Rosoka Text Analytics. Rosoka is an industry leader of text analytics solutions. Their enterprise solution Rosoka Server is great for large scale analysis of unstructured data. This blog is about their standalone solution which is a plug-in for i2.

So, why is it a ‘no-brainer’?

Well, to start off with its fully integrated with IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook. It’s a plug-in that has been created in close collaboration with IBM and you can tell. We tested the plug-in against several datasets, including the case study we used in the previous blog post. This data can be found here.

Here are the reasons why we think it’s a ‘no-brainer’ plug-in:

• It extracts entities and links from unstructured files such as PDF’s, Word documents and txt files. It then allows users to generate Analyst’s Notebook charts based on the content
• Processing time is quick compared to reading the documents manually and quicker than the free extraction engines used in our previous blog
• During testing we found the entity extraction to be very accurate. What was more impressive was the relationship extraction. In our previous blog we inferred links based on how many times two entities are mentioned in the same document. What Rosoka do is far more sophisticated and is based on the language around the two entities
• Entity extraction is good but it can create a lot of noise. Rosoka’ s use of Salience (relevance) means we could always find the most relevant extracted entities and ignore the others
• Rosoka applies entity resolution to its extraction. This meant that if Theresa May is mentioned as ‘Theresa’, ‘Mrs May’ or even ‘She’ in a document, Rosoka will be able to resolve these different texts as one entity.
• It’s easy to reclassify an extracted entity from say a person to a company (for example Robert Dyas the UK hardware store). Rosoka can also learn from your decisions so it doesn’t make the same mistake again
• Rosoka is truly multilingual. We tested this by running several news articles about Islamic State through Rosoka in different languages. The organisation Islamic State was mentioned in both the Russian and the Arabic news articles. On the chart they were resolved into one entity, despite them originating from two different languages. That meant that when we expanded Islamic state we got linked items from both the Russian and the Arabic articles.
• The most surprising reason Rosoka is a no-brainer though is the price. For a fraction of the cost of IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook the plug-in delivers accurate, multilingual, unstructured data analysis. We’ve looked at costs for this type of technology for clients before and often the requirements were dropped, due to budget restrictions; well not with Rosoka!

In conclusion, we believe Rosoka is a ‘no-brainer’ plug-in for i2 Analyst’s Notebook. The functionality, ease of use and price will just make any analysts life easier!

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

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

Who doesn’t love a good dashboard? What better way to gain a high-level understanding of your data than to see it come alive in bright colours before your eyes? They’re great for presentations but can also give valuable insights into where the peaks and troths in your data lie. From an analytical perspective, it can give you a starting point for your analysis; which with large datasets is very useful.

Dashboards need data. i2 users will store most of their data in iBase; which is very sensible. They do this because items can be quickly retrieved using the intuitive search tools, while the details and hidden connections are easily drilled down upon using i2 Analyst’s Notebook.

It is not always possible, or indeed sensible to place your entire iBase database onto an Analyst’s Notebook chart.

So i2 users have the data, they also have the ability to drill down into the detail. What they sometimes lack is the high-level statistics that a dashboard can provide.

Analyst’s Notebook – Bar Charts and Histograms

One way of doing this is to use the Bar Charts and Histograms functionality within Analyst’s Notebook. This functionality has proven itself very popular as it provides interactive statistical information. The only limitation to this functionality is: it only works with data that is on an Analyst’s Notebook Chart. Statistical information works best with lots of data and it is not always possible, or indeed sensible to place your entire iBase database onto an Analyst’s Notebook chart.

PowerBI

Power BI is a dashboard and reporting analytics tools that can connect to existing data sources and deliver insights that might otherwise have been missed. It allows its users to produce beautiful, interactive reports and then publish them for your organization to consume.

The example below shows national crime information. The data (although fake) is being held in an iBase database. The dashboard shows a location heat map (top left), number of crimes by type (top right), crimes by ward (bottom left) and crimes by date (bottom right).

PowerBI is interactive, meaning a user can drill down into a specific area of the data. In the example below a user has concentrated on pedal cycle crime.

From here the user can glean insights into this crime type. They can see the areas of the country that have the most pedal cycle crime. The time of the year which it most occurs (July to October) and which wards are most affected (Thames Valley Police and Cambridgeshire).

This can assist with strategic planning. If tasked with reducing pedal bike crime, a team could concentrate on university towns (Thames Valley and Cambridgeshire both hold large universities) between the date ranges of July to October.

What’s the catch?

In order to use iBase data with PowerBI you need a good understanding of your iBase security set-up and the underlying table structure; both of which S-branch can help you with. Regarding costs, the desktop version of PowerBI is free; yes free. This allows users to produce dashboards locally. Most organisations will choose a paid for package where they publish dashboards other colleagues within their organisation. To view a published dashboard all that is needed is a web browser.

For more information on PowerBI, visit the website here. For information on how to integrate it with your iBase implementation (new or old) please contact us