Information Visualization on Organized Crime Trials

Abstract

Today everyone on the Internet becomes an active writer. It is simpler than ever to produce and to share new knowledge on the net. Users risk to be overwhelmed by too much information. To handle unorganized data may involve a huge effort by people and this could lead to information overload. A promising way to face these problems is Information Visualization. This contribution is a report of using visuo-spatial reasoning to help sociology scholars to understand and to manage large amounts of textual data. We use a very interesting dataset, especially for sociologists and jurists, extracted from a collection of sentences of trials on organized crime activities in Sicily. We report the results obtained in so far clustering and visualizing data.