Release notes - i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis 2.5.2

Enhancements have been made to ANBP to streamline the user experience when connecting to the i2 Online software as service offering. Changes to the connection and login screens as well as guidance messages make it easier to understand working with i2 Online and highlight the differences that an Analyst's Notebook user may experience.

When connected to i2 Online, ANBP now defaults to the standard i2 chart palette for charts as well as importing, and displays "classic" import specifications automatically.

Additionally Mapping no longer defaults to i2 Maps when connected to i2 Online, and provides guidance on which map provider to use for chart data.

The Find Matching Records tool also displays guidance for its use with chart and i2 Online data.

Optionally, double clicking an information store chart entity now performs a single level expand over all links for that entity making easier to find and explore associated information from the chart surface.

This behavior is controlled from a new settings menu in the i2 Analyze connection toolbar.

Changing application settings

The new List Records tool gives the user the ability to explore the data records of items on the chart, allowing the records and their properties to be filtered, sorted, and viewed in a table layout for quick and easy comparisons. Clicking items in the table view centers them on the chart, and provides the ability to add or refine chart item selection state.

Additional filtering capabilities give the user the ability to further filter data, for example by selection state, items linked to most records, link end types, or the most linked ends.

The table view of the listed records can be copied to the clipboard for inclusion in other documents, with configuration options provided to tailor the formats of the clipboard data.

List Records replaces the previous List Data Records tool and is compatible with data records from both iBase and i2 Analyze.

Using List Records

Items that are selected on the chart can be emphasized with animated colored outlines to draw attention to key information regardless of the zoom level and chart complexity.

The color of the outline and whether it is animated can be controlled from the Analyst's Notebook options menu.

Using Highlight Selections

New and enhanced selection tools make it quicker to select the data you need in a chart. Select or deselect all Entities or Links, Deselect or filter by specific entity or semantic types, and select, deselect, or filter by related semantic types such as different types of Property – Bank Account, Motor Vehicle for example.

Select “standalone” entities with no connections with the Singleton Entity selection tool.

Selecting items

Additional icons have been added for social media services and new technologies.

These new icons are available for Analyst's Notebook Premium, and for the i2 Analyze server and server based clients.

The following are some examples.

New condition operators are now available when using values from a lookup table to apply a conditional format. The new operators, Is Set/Is not Set and Is Present/Is Absent, can be used to apply a format based on the whether a property or attribute is populated or not.

Using Conditional Formatting

When importing data that contains date and time properties a new key helps the user to understand the codes used to define custom date and time formats, ensuring that this information is correctly imported. The default codes that are displayed in the key are based on the region settings of the computer.

Importing Data

The Bar Charts and Histograms tool has been enhanced with the addition of Play Backwards and Expand Backwards options for Histograms.

Using Bar Charts & Histograms

New options in the activity view pane right click menu allow the user to select the Latest, Earliest, or All activities for selected rows making it easy to find and focus on key data.

The menu has also been updated to clarify that Remove actions affect rows within the activity view.

In addition, after selecting an individual activity users can move the current selection to the next or previous activity using the arrow keys.

Using Activity View

A new Scale bar provides a key for the shading of the time wheel and gives the user the option to directly change the scale color and scaling method for the wheel.

Additionally, the time wheel counts can now be calculated based on all chart items or only the selected items.

Optionally, selecting a sector or sectors in the time wheel can pan the chart to bring the records in that sector(s) into focus.

Using the Time Wheel

The Export to KML tool on the Publish toolbar exports chart items with geographic coordinate information to a KML or KMZ file that can be used with Google Earth Pro and other GIS products to display the locations of the chart items on a map.

Mapping chart items

The new license management mechanism within Analyst's Notebook Premium helps to ensure that the product is used within the terms of the license agreement. License management supports standalone, network, or cloud based licensing.

Please note that standalone licenses are not supported when using Remote Desktop Services.

Licensing information

Analyst's Notebook Premium and i2 Notebook users can now share data on a chart with other users by giving them a URL link. On opening the link in a browser, and logging in, the i2 Notebook web client displays a list of the shared records which can be viewed in situ or added to a chart. The records list can be filtered by item type, and then further filtered by property value ranges. The shared data can also be transferred from the browser to the ANBP desktop client if installed.

The shared data accessed from the URL is a snapshot of the shared chart data at the time it was shared. If the shared data is charted in i2 Notebook or the ANBP desktop client the original chart layout is maintained if possible.

Shared data links have an expiry date set when created, the duration of which is configured by a system administrator. Users can view their currently active data sharing links, and can remove any that are no longer required. Once a data sharing link is removed or expires the shared data is no longer available to the users it was shared with. An administrator can manage all data sharing links from the admin web page.

Records accessed through the Share Data URL are not controlled by the data security model; care must be taken when sharing sensitive information.

The ability to create shared data links is controlled on a group basis using command access control.

Using Share Records

Configuring file sharing permissions

360-degree views for information store records giving a detailed view of the key relationships for an entity can now be accessed directly from the Analyst's Premium desktop client. Previously, 360 view was only available from the i2 Notebook web-client and i2 Investigate.

The 360 views in i2 Notebook and the ANBP desktop client are driven by highlight queries defined by an administrator. These highlight queries can now be made visible or hidden on a user group basis. This ensures that users are presented with a 360 view that suits their analytical needs.

About Highlight queries

Visual Queries can now be used to graphically create multi item queries over external data sources, specifying the conditions required for matching properties. The developer of the connector for the external data sources must create and configure the Visual Queries to make them available to the user.

Developing Visual Queries for external searches

The new Lists tool in i2 Notebook provides the user with a tabular view of the contents of a chart, with each entity and link type on a separate tab. Each item type can be sorted by property column and filtered for specific values. The selection state of chart items is reflected in the List view.

The List view can be for all chart items or restricted to the currently selected items on the chart.

Individual item Lists can be copied to the clipboard or downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet; or alternatively the entire contents of the List can be exported as a single multi-tab spreadsheet.

With Explore, users can browse data in an i2 Notebook chart based on entity and link type, and filter by property value ranges. Bar chart visualizations provide overviews of chart counts to help understand the spread of data in the chart.

Chart selection can be controlled from the Explore tool making it easy to select/deselect specific data on the chart.

Dynamic security provides greater flexibility for an organization to manage the security of its data. Organizations that change their security schema often, or want to adopt an existing classification system without duplicating it, can use providers to supply some or all of the security permissions and dimension values at runtime.

Using a security permissions provider also makes it possible to apply permissions on a per user basis.

Dynamic security requires the implementation of Java interfaces.

Providing security dimension values