Industries

Overview and Challenges

As modern technology continues to evolve, people and organizations are being deluged with information, more quickly and from more sources than ever before. In order for organizations to remain competitive, all this data must be interpreted, understood, shared, and responded to accurately and expeditiously. This challenge is particularly crucial to defense and intelligence organizations, where information from multiple sources must be shared by people in multiple locations — people who may have unique job responsibilities, varied clearance levels, and fluency in different languages.

Clearly, managing knowledge and understanding complex relational data is critical to the success and efficiency of defense and intelligence organizations. A unique challenge is the need to track detailed data for individuals, as well as more general trends and patterns of organizations. This type and quantity of information needs to be stored, categorized, sorted, queried, analyzed, and displayed so people can make sense of it quickly. How can all this information be effectively managed?

Tom Sawyer Software Solutions

Given the complex and evolving needs of the defense and intelligence industries, visualization is a particularly effective data management solution. Visualizing large amounts of complex relational data provides users with the significant benefit of being able to easily track and understand such information. Enhanced comprehension naturally expedites response time, which is mission critical in defense and intelligence.

Tom Sawyer's software solutions let users create an intuitive visual representation of complex network systems, financial flows, social network structures, system infrastructure hierarchies, organizational systems, logistical and operational plans, and other relational data structures.

Our customizable visualization products allow flexibility and ease of use. Application-specific data can be integrated through two independent channels. The batch loading facility loads objects, relationships, and attributes from various sources including databases, files, online systems, and applications. Our software's automatic layout process can take these objects, relations, and attributes, along with drawing specifications and automatically produce visual representations of the data. Alternatively, the interactive facility employs traditional keyboard and mouse operations to allow users to manipulate their diagrams.

The data in underlying databases is often different than the data's schematic representations in the technical documentation. As systems are continually updated with manual techniques, it may prove too expensive and time consuming to keep accurate schematic representations at all times. This introduces a high level of risk at which incorrect decisions could be made.

Circular graph drawing illustrating a narcotics network helps identify and document major power players as well as small-time dealers within a drug distribution ring.

Hierarchical graph drawing depicting the Sopranos family tree. It uses colored nodes to differentiate separate lineages. Orthogonal edge routing creates a clear organizational view and horizontal edge routings illustrate couples.

With Tom Sawyer's visualization solutions, users can dynamically update their diagrams to incorporate new information immediately. A real-time view of your data provides considerable advantage to intelligence and defense projects where data sets tend to drift drastically from the schematics that are printed or on file in the technical documentation.

Complete with a robust graph and drawing model, Tom Sawyer's visualization solutions provide an underlying engine for representing objects and relationships in a compact logical architecture. Along with a customizable graphical user interface, our solutions provide a complete diagramming framework that enables users to interactively create visual models.

Case Studies

• See our Cataphora Case Study.

Webinars

• Watch our webinar, Relationship Analytics and Data Visualization for Time-Critical Decisions.