Procedures for discovering, querying, searching and making inferences about investigative evidence benefit from applications of complexity science in general, and from agent-based modeling in specific ways. These methods support self-organization of evidence into hypotheses and arguments that may be tested in a novel environment and improve opportunities for timely discovery of new evidence and evidential relationships. These methods do not require foreknowledge of what questions will be asked and what links must be designed to facilitate their ability to enhance discovery. Questions and links are emergent . Figure 1, below, is a useful way to begin to consider the role of emergence in bringing about discovery.
Abduction serves as an intellectual process or bridge to tie the two themes together.
This simplistic and notional drawing depicts how agents link through interaction to produce emergence-new levels of organization or structure that we could not have previously predicted from observation of the individual agents alone. The number of agents, as expressed on the y-axis, is a relativistic quantity designed to demonstrate that multiple agents are required in order to induce some measure of complexity. Abduction, as a bridge superstructure, may lead us through discovery from a zone of disorder into order that might be perceived and understood. The ABEM model is built within a modeling environment called a technology graph. The technology graph allows the modeler to visualize process and product simultaneously.