Dynalink: A Framework for Dynamic Criminal Network Visualization

Understanding the temporal development and patterns of criminal networks is important for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to investigate and prevent crimes. Extracting and visualizing criminal networks from a large amount of crime data has been a challenge over the past years. In particular, the visualization of the dynamic development of such networks over time has been difficult in many ways. Recent advancement of visual analytics provides new analytical reasoning tools to explore and analyze a large amount of data with interactive visual interfaces. By employing the ideas of visual analytics, we propose here a framework to visualize dynamic criminal networks, which is called Dynalink. The interactive and visual features of Dynalink can be useful in discovering and analyzing both relational and temporal patterns of criminal networks.