Enabling Activity Based Intelligence with Visual Analytics

ThornViz is a visual analytics tool presenting data along multiple perspectives for discovering the unexpected and performing Activity Based Intelligence (ABI) analysis. It leverages a flexible data model along with a graph database to support ABI principles through interactive visual exploration of intelligence data including dynamic filtering and social network analysis techniques. ThornViz was applied to explore adversarial communication network data, to investigate crypto-currency transactions for suspicious financial activity, as well as to look for potential collaborations between NATO scientific activities, which demonstrated its multi-domain support. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-200 RSY — the ICMCIS, held in Skopje, North Macedonia, 16—;17 May 2023

I. Introduction

In this paper, we argue that visual analytics is a valuable enabler for ABI. We present the ThomViz tool (shown in Fig. 1) which offers visual analytics approaches for Activity Based Intelligence (ABI) analysis, as an example of how this can be implemented.