User needs for investigative Journalism

Let's give names to our use cases, as a way to be able to refer to them more targetedly in future conversations.

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Find people data

• Discover relationships between people
• Be able to identify people quickly, with less hours of Googling
• Find out what a person owns (regardless of country)
• Who are the persons, friends, contacts, business partners, enemies?
• Finding all info linking a person to another
• Know how reliable and recent information is
• Find all info on a person
• Correlate online (social) activity with sources, documents
• A MP monitoring portal powered by CSO data that lives on a mainstream media outlet site
• Know who the influencing people in a country are
• Worldwide patters in legislative voting? Do women vote differently from men on social policy? Is there a correlation between legislators age & support for same-sex marriage? etc.

Find story ideas

• Figure out the most important facts in a set of documents quickly
• Be able to find stories I did not know I had
• Given some data, find the important facts - the stories
• A way to detect / ID patterns in/between files and share results
• Getting to know if anything inside news anywhere is connected to my data

Track changes

• How do we keep track of changing data (monthly or yearly, etc.)
• Update an old story with fresh data… for free
• Get notified each time some new info about a person becomes available
• Notify me when new data emerge concerning a story I’m reporting
• Data isn’t always perfect, it sometimes needs revision. How does a tool deal with updates of connections?
• Notify me when a politician changes point of view
• I want automatic passive discovery of entities across different document stores

Data verification

• Can any document confirm some rumor I heard elsewhere?
• Is there a newer/older/different version of this document?
• Trust that a document is not a forgery
• Cite source documents in my final story
• See articles that have already been written about a document

Workflow

• Toolkit to pilot a structured journalism activity w/in a media house
• Keep track of my research
• Make corrections and annotations on documents
• I want a way to securely edit docs collaboratively
• I want a free open-source Nuix-like front end

Languages Tabula in other alphabets!

Follow the money

• Visualize the amount of money flowing through a production & supply chain, including investment and trading
• Find suspicious corporate structures by pattern
• Who is paying for something (building, company, event, etc.)
• Find out who owns a particular asset
• Find out all online traces of a company
• Quickly find companies structure
• Discover & tabulate financial relationships between entities of interest

Anomalies

• See the extreme records in a dataset (biggest, smallest)
• Is there anything unusual about this document
• Find anomalies in financial data

Data processing

• Wipe metadata from a document
• Integrate & automate entity searches w/in media houses CMS
• A way to ID dirty document files + group for cleaning
• See if two datasets are connected without waiting to clean (it)
• I want the ability to OCR a hundred page PDF on a standard computer in under a second
• Search another person’s document
• Join two databases to find insights neither could provide alone
• Manually go through docs to fill up a spreadsheet
• Work with a dataset that’s too large for Excel
• Sort things
• Count things
• Map out places mentioned in document
• How long is the word that was redacted in this document?
• Correlate data between different types of media.

Spreadsheets

• Better applications where spreadsheet is the interface (i.e. more featureful spreadsheets for enrichment, reconciliation, etc.
• Have template spreadsheets for different story models
• Database look-up from Google Spreadsheets.

Provenance / Sources

• Source data linking
• Structuring ad hoc data as a part of the journalism process
• Machine readable provenance for news stories

Entity, Identification, Matching

• Match similar entity, allow manual match
• Automated data cleaning tracker - always know the source of your data.
• Entity reconciliation API (for deduplication) (i.e. I have entities, I want to match them up, against other’s people’s entities. I want to be able to match up each database’s entities).
• Fuzzy - match two lists, quickly.
• Be able to match lists of names (peps) to companies’ databases.
• Learn easy ways to reconcile and match data, names, ID’s

Identify relationships

• Identifying people and linking people from different areas
• Understand nature of the relationship (opposition v/s alliance)

Workflow

• Process very quickly: Time matters!
• Be secure
• Spend less time reviewing data quality
• Simple data analysis (Not “R”)
• Bookmark
• Have a Pre-launch checklist for data projects
• Manage different type of access sights (public, private, share)

Monitoring alerts - Fetch patterns

• Have an AI that feeds journalists with alerts of organised crime and corruption
• Hit lists search / alerts
• Alert me when a partner adds a document for someone I am interested in
• Monitor entities information from news and databases and rank it
• Have my database search the Internet for me for people I am interested in or add the docs to my database
• A tool that keeps on investigating after the reporter lost interest in the topic
• If this then that / Simple alerts for datasets that are regularly published
• How do I keep track of relationships
• Look for patters in data using machine learning

Document display

• Very efficient viewer with search highlights
• Display original document
• Highlights

Import data docs

• Microwork platform for uploading hand written data
• Import docs when I don’t know the languages in them
• Import any doc in any format
• Import structured data or unstructured data into system
• Turn forms into spreadsheet
• OCR
• Read disclosure documents and make a spreadsheet of major board decisions.

Skunkworks

• Open Source transliteration that works
• Global address parsing.

Federated search data docs cross queries

• Figure out who has documents I need to see
• A service to find who may have data matching a query, i.e. “yes-no” response with information on how to contact that source.
• Search the database of other partners (API)
• Database that allows for complex boolean or other search functionality
• Run large groups of people or companies against other people’s (or my own) database
• Where to look for data on my topic
• Federated search: Search OpenCorporates, Littlesis, Poderopedia, etc.
• Search other news sources, Lexis Nexis for poor people
• Be able to mine all social networks at once

Visualization / geocoding

• Understanding domain specifics hierarchy
• On entry into database -all geographic things are converted to latitude or longitude (geocode)
• Export from database directly to visualization tool, map or timeline
• Timelines
• Draw a map of the ownership structure of companies in my story
• Visualize networks, maps, occurrence

Editorial

• Explaining complex relationships to readers

Entity and facet extraction

• Entity extraction in any language
• Define new facets, depending on the dataset
• Knowing what to look for in a pile of documents
• Entity-extraction in different languages
• Pull names quickly off of a webpage

Misc

• I’d like a tool that would measure the cost of corruption in terms of impact (environ’ / pockets / social).
• Global Address Parsing.
• Conflict of interest lead finder
• Contribute data with Sunset Secrecy / we will keep this secret / closed and only for 30 days
• Open Source transliteration that works
• Signature detection comparision
• Tool that makes money
• Needle in a haystack
• See a system structure
• Merge info from multiple sources
• Identify things