Appreciation notes
Network-of-Experts Workshop on
Social Network Analysis and Visualisation for Public Safety
Held 18th – 19th October 2005
FGAN, Bonn, Germany
Under the patronage of NATO IST-059/RTG-025, Visualising Network Information
Workshop Summary
Social network analysis provides a means to study the varied and diverse interactive
relationships among individuals, organisations, groups and countries. The impact of the social
network whether on the individual or on the nation plays an important role influencing individual
or collective physical, environmental and public safety. Social network analysis is used in public
safety, for instance, detecting and tracking terrorists or extremists for CBRN (chemical,
biological, radiological and nuclear) threats, domestically generated threats, organised crime or
civil emergency. Researchers working on social network analysis have also, for example,
identified how infectious diseases such as SARS or STDs can be spread among individuals
across different social groups and communities.
The participants of the workshop addressed the above from different perspectives and using
different approaches but collectively they complement each other. Notable among them:

A new approach for providing information for intelligence analysts, military
commanders, individual solders and others using the concept of custom ontologies based
on each users query was discussed: a concise and organized knowledge set with the
appropriate visualisation tool to assist exploration and facilitate intelligence assimilation
is provided to users, c.f. convention approach of searching thousands relevant and
irrelevant documents or building a large all-encompassing ontology.

Other presenters suggested a suite of several means to resolve knowledge creation
problems from intelligence and other data: increase the bandwidth, develop a cyber
equivalent of a fly-through data approach, and conserve analyst attention, focus on the
negative space and adapt to individual users.

Work at FGAN focused on the identification and visualisation of relations extracted from
ISR-messages (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) using the FGAN’s J2Database (DBEins) for message acquisition and xGErD, a network representation of
relations.

Health Canada developed tools including VITA and the Master Battle Planner [developed
by Qinetiq] to manage and visualise network relationship and logistic analysis for
infectious disease outbreak management, which are applicable for the
management/analysis of CBRN and other public threats.
Appreciation Notes
Workshop Structure
Provocations
Provocations are useful but it would be helpful if they were a bit longer, about 20 minutes, with
more time for discussion. It is also important that provocations be focused on specific workshop
topics. In preparation of provocations, it may be useful for presenters to address specific
scenarios (practical or theoretical) or points of interest of the group.
This would require more preparation of the provocation prior to the workshop, possibly in
collaboration with the workshop co-chairs.
A possible provocation format might be “Given <a particular workshop-related topic or issue>,
here is a suggested approach… .”
Agenda and Duration
It may be more productive to group all provocations and discussions first, followed by the
breakout sessions. In addition, it would be useful for the entire group to discuss the wording and
framing of the workshop questions before breaking out into groups. This would probably be best
to do after the provocations.
This is consistent with the notion that the “provocation” sessions engender discussion and
thought to inform the breakout sessions. Depending on the scheduled N/X workshop activities, it
might be possible to accomplish this in two days, but a three-day workshop may be required.
Research Issues
In his provocation, Jan-Terje Björke observed the need for experiments to study, for example,
how individuals perceive networks, how patterns in networks are perceived, how network
attributes are remembered, and so on. It’s not clear if the resources are available to support it,
but if carried out, such a research program would be a valuable guide to the development of
visualization tools and techniques.
As discussed, a meeting on research agendas could be attached to the Copenhagen meeting. This
satellite meeting could propose topics of research and possibly evaluate initial study proposals
prepared in advance.
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Appreciation Notes
General Comments
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the N/X, it would be helpful to develop for workshop
attendees a glossary of common terminology for the workshop domain.
In addition, if there are other NATO RTGs with relevant expertise, it might be useful to
investigate whether questions that arise during an N/X workshop might be directed to them, or
whether or not it might be worthwhile to organize a collaborative workshop or meeting with
them.
Finally, the workshop presented a large palette of provocations, which engendered often lengthy
discussions. However, given the short duration of the workshop, it was difficult to sustain a
focused dialog on the workshop topics. In addition, it seemed that too little time was available
for in-depth consideration of workshop topics during the breakout sessions.
Largely for these reasons and as discussed above, it is recommended that provocations be
carefully tailored to the particular workshop topics, that breakout topics be subject to interactive
revision and re-framing as needed during the workshop, and that extending the duration of the
N/X workshop from two to three days be considered.
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