A Framework for Measuring Imagination in Visual Analytics Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for measuring imagination support in criminal analysis systems. Imagination is important for criminal analysts in their everyday work when they have to solve criminal cases. Typically, they are faced with a huge amount of information that is often ill-structured, do not contain all relationships, and are characterised by many uncertainties. In order to draw correct conclusions and to solve cases, analysts need imagination to find out facts from such data, or in other words: to detect the signals out from the noise. This paper describes a general framework for introducing imagination support in criminal analysis systems. The framework consists of two parts, first the operationalisation of imagination, and second, guidelines for an experimental setting of evaluating criminal analysis systems regarding their imagination support. This work is intended to serve as a baseline for future evaluation work of criminal analysis systems.