Semantic data allows one to richly express the movements of an individual or a group over some area. This type of geospatial information is difficult comprehend using text or even a 2D environment. Using three-dimensional and virtual environments, we allow the user to visualize the data and to allow powerful manipulation techniques. In this project, we propose a system that visualizes the movement of international criminals or terrorists over the span of the globe using input from semantic data. In addition, the user of the system will be able to view (or listen to) associated metadata for each subject of interest at a given location, such as a suspicious phone call or an image of a handwritten message.

Motivation

Closely tracking the movements of any one person will yield a tremendous amount of data. A person may take a flight from Hamburg to Paris, and then drive to Madrid. At a hotel in Madrid the person may make a phone call to someone in Malaysia. If you add more and more people to this system, many interesting patterns emerge. Sometimes these patterns may be inferred by a computer system, but often they cannot. Three-dimensional visualization within an information rich environment empowers the user to spot patterns they may not previously have noticed. For example, if we see suspected terrorists flying to different cities in a database, it may not mean much. But if we actually see the planes they are flying in within our 3D visualization tool, we may notice that the aircraft models are all the same. And noticing this type of information can make the difference in preventing a major catastrophe. SemanticSpy is a system to augment a user’s ability to understand data by bringing the information to life.

Basic Workflow

A good way to demonstrate the use of SemanticSpy is to describe the basic workflow for a user. Typically, a user would start the application by importing the RDF data describing persons of interest and their travel patterns. Once the data is loaded, a three-dimensional globe would appear along with a list of people that can be tracked. The user would select a person and a starting and ending date. SemanticSpy would then display the starting point of the suspect on the globe and would display the points on the globe that the suspect has visited and the mode of travel during the given time period. Various destinations during the suspect’s trip may have associated information that the user can retrieve. The user can rotate the globe if a suspect's travel spans continents or zoom in to get a closer look.

Intended Audience

SemanticSpy is intended for use by military, intelligence, and police agencies. SemanticSpy is meant to complement the existing tools used by these agencies to track individuals of interest. Furthermore, researchers can use SemanticSpy as a guide to build other semantic-enhanced visualization applications.

Application Mockup

This is a very crude mockup of the proposed system. The left side shows the globe that can be rotated to track a suspect around the globe. The cities visited by the suspect are shown on the globe, with one city highlighted. This highlighted city has associated data, which in this case is a phone call made by suspect. [Image credits: NASA (globe), FBI (terrorist)]

About Projects Library Events

Large Scale Distributed Information Systems
Department of Computer Science
The University of Georgia
415 Graduate Studies Research Center
Athens, GA 30602-7404
Fax: (706) 542-2966