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About Cataphora
Cataphora is the pioneer and industry leader in the field of evidence analytics, the management and analysis of electronic data from an evidentiary perspective. Cataphora’s technology provides insight into individual and organizational behavior, based on the extensive trails of digital footprints that people create each day. Used for litigation and investigation, Cataphora’s behavioral modeling technology, document review platform, and evidence analysis services help uncover real-world truths that have been memorialized in the virtual record.
Cataphora’s C-Evidence Review Platform
Cataphora’s C-Evidence Review Platform allows its customers to understand communication patterns and to compile, sort, and analyze client documents. Cataphora uses Tom Sawyer Visualization to find patterns in the information, and then uses C-Evidence to deliver the results of the analysis to clients. With C-Evidence, users can quickly understand broad patterns of facts, find important information, and gain a clear understanding of the truth.
Cataphora’s Challenge
From Cataphora’s founding, its core technology has centered around looking at electronic data as large graphs of interconnected evidence. These graphs can be computationally analyzed in a large number of ways to find near-cliques, compute actor centrality, and compare role similarity. Early on, Cataphora had the ability to answer very difficult questions, but was faced with the problem of knowing which questions were the optimal ones to ask in any given context. Each of these computations takes a long time to run, so focus is key. In addition, while the numerical results could impart large amounts of information to a trained specialist, this information was often difficult to convey to non-technical clients.
Cataphora needed a way to quickly generate meaningful visualizations to help them and their clients understand graphs and networks at a high level. Armed with this knowledge, they could quickly focus on the important features in the data. Cataphora would then know where to start looking for the most important evidence and what type of information to feed into their analysis software.
According to Keith Schon, Senior Software Engineer at Cataphora, "With a visualization application, Cataphora can get a sense of what is going on, to narrow down possibilities. We can then test the remaining individual theories rigorously with quantitative graph analysis software. Without the ability to graphically see connections, it is very difficult to understand how pieces of information and people relate to each other. It is also very hard to coherently represent our results in an understandable format."
Choosing Tom Sawyer
Cataphora researched the market and found that Tom Sawyer Software was the clear leader in producing large-scale graph-based visualizations to coherently present complicated information.
Schon said, "Tom Sawyer Software has been wonderful in enabling us to produce drawings that can scale up to thousands of nodes, or more. Their layout algorithms are very useful to us. We researched other companies, but none of their layouts scaled nearly as well. None have the efficient symmetric layout algorithm of Tom Sawyer Software that enables us to easily understand the networks we lay out."
The Tom Sawyer Solution
Tom Sawyer Visualization enables you to develop graph visualization applications quickly and efficiently. You can easily enhance your applications with sophisticated graph display, viewing and editing technologies presented in an eye-catching, intuitive graphical user interface. With the help of Tom Sawyer Visualization,Cataphora can quickly create drawings and identify important relationships in their data.
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Cataphora analyzes a dataset, producing large graphs that can be fed into Tom Sawyer Visualization to generate drawings that highlight different behaviors and aspects of interest. The way the graph is built from the data depends on a number of variables that are configured according to what answers are being sought. Edge weights can be based upon communication volume or discussion length between actors, shared content volume between documents, or anything else considered important to an investigation. The resulting visualization can clearly show working group structures, information flow, or strength of relationships. Once a visualization is created, it is saved in SVG or PDF format and added to Cataphora’s C-Evidence Review Platform for client review.
"Tom Sawyer Software excels in drawing graphs so that you can see natural groups that occur. I’m sometimes asked whether a visualization is meaningful - have I made it look a certain way to show what I want it to? I can assure clients that the drawing is automatically laid out based on meaningful properties. Through Tom Sawyer drawings, you can easily find out who works with whom, who is central to a network, and who is separated in their own world," stated Schon.
The Tom Sawyer Impact
Tom Sawyer Visualization’s ability to objectively lay out graphs has allowed Cataphora to more readily understand the vast amount of data they receive. It has also allowed Cataphora to demonstrate and sell their services and the C-Evidence Review Platform to clients.
Schon said, "Without Tom Sawyer Visualization, we would be forced to do less, look at smaller pictures, and filter everything down to a smaller degree. Everything would take longer to find out. Tom Sawyer Visualization definitely helps us and our clients quickly understand the facts and piece together evidence to see what is going on. It enables us to identify important structures and makes it much easier to know the right questions to ask. Consequently, we can quickly make high impact presentations that help our clients understand what is going on and how C-Evidence can help them."
Overview
- Cataphora’s core technology creates behavioral models derived from unstructured electronic data, the analysis of which reveals behavior patterns recorded in the dataset.
- The core technology creates “Discussions” that link together causally related data records to provide historical context.
- Cataphora’s library of analytics provides insight into the behaviors and relationships reflected by the dataset, allowing clients to make measurements, judgments, and predictions based on the interactions that can be derived from the electronic data record.
- Refined visualizations facilitate comprehension of the social behaviors suggested by the dataset.
- With visualizations, clients can view and quickly assess potentially alarming abnormalities in individual or organizational behavior.
- Cataphora’s C-Evidence platform allows clients to view their data at many levels, ranging from the smallest details to the behavior of large organizational groups.
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