i2 is a company based out of the UK that designs and distributes a wide variety of visual analysis software tools. Analyst Notebook 7 is their link and social network analysis software that they create for law enforcement, government, and the security industry. It is very similar to Sentinel: Threat Management System, a product that I reviewed earlier. Analyst Notebook, unlike Sentinel, has been around for longer, and thus, is one of the industry standards. Most of the alphabet soup agencies use this product, hence the importance of being familiar with it.

Analyst Notebook has some very interesting capabilities that set it apart from Sentinel. i2 focuses it its ability to do link analysis by utilizing visualization functions in a chronological, transactional, and geographical manner. It has a powerful data importer that makes it very easy to import from different types of files and databases. Combing Analyst Notebook 7 with other i2 solutions would make any organization have a quick and simple process of uploading and sharing vast amounts of critical information for analysis.

The Timeline feature displays entities in a chronological order, and allows the user to represent links between entities over time.

The Transactional feature allows users to see trends of monetary transfers between bank accounts or telephone calls between people.

Finally, the link analysis feature gives users the ability to morph the network of entities into different hierarchical structures, insert multimedia associated with entities, or even put a geographical map as a background to give perspective of location.

Check it out for yourself
i2 Analyst Notebook 7