Abstract:
The present invention comprises a computer program and system that is designed to allow a user to view complex data easily. The program is targeted at displaying information that represents the movement of information from one place, computer, data store, or account, to another. Examples of things that can be viewed include E-mails, Phone Records, Accounting Records and others. This can be used for investigation purposes, since it allows the ties between employees to be uncovered quickly. Equally important for investigations is the ability to change the focus from the owner of the mailbox to that of the correspondents. This allows the tracking of activities of the outside contact in the organization. This would also be useful for viewing ones own mailbox, when you know that you&#39;re looking for a memo that came from someone in particular, this visual representation makes it much easier to traverse emails than conventional list formats.

Description:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS 
     Statement Regarding Federally Sponsored Research or Development 
       [0001]    Not Applicable 
       INCORPORATION-BY-REFERENCE OF MATERIAL SUBMITTED ON A COMPACT DISC 
       [0002]    Not Applicable 
       BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 
       [0003]    1. Field of the Invention 
         [0004]    The present invention relates generally to data analysis and, in one of its aspects to visually organizing, displaying and reviewing collections of transactions. 
         [0005]    2. Description of Related Art 
         [0006]    It has been common to organize collections of transactions in lists and tree structures. Such organization sometimes appears in the form of tables. 
       BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 
       [0007]    The present invention comprises a computer program and system that is designed to allow a user to view complex data easily. The program is targeted at displaying information that represents the movement of information from one place, computer, data store, or account, to another. Examples of things that can be viewed include E-mails, Phone Records, Accounting Records and others. This can be used for investigation purposes, since it allows the ties between employees to be uncovered quickly. This would also be useful for viewing ones own mailbox, when you know that you&#39;re looking for a memo that came from someone in particular, this visual representation makes it much easier to find than conventional list formats. 
         [0008]    These and other objects, advantages and features of this invention will be apparent from the following description taken with reference to the accompanying drawing, wherein is shown a preferred embodiment of the invention. 
     
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWING 
         [0009]      FIG. 1  is a main screen view; 
           [0010]      FIG. 2A  is a filtered view of the screen of  FIG. 1 ; 
           [0011]      FIG. 2B  is a refocus on another target of  FIG. 2A ; 
           [0012]      FIG. 3  is a display message list generated from the filtered view of  FIG. 2 ; 
           [0013]      FIG. 4  is a display message of an email chosen from the list of  FIG. 3 ; 
           [0014]      FIG. 5  is a display histogram generated from the filtered list; 
           [0015]      FIG. 6  is a display of normal traffic; 
           [0016]      FIG. 7  is a display of traffic within a group; 
           [0017]      FIG. 8  is an overview display; 
           [0018]      FIG. 9  is a display of mailboxes; 
           [0019]      FIG. 10  is a list of reports; 
           [0020]      FIG. 11  is an overview of the system; 
           [0021]      FIG. 12  is a diagrammatic representation of email storage organization; and 
           [0022]      FIG. 13  is a diagram of the database of an entity relationship. 
       
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION 
       [0023]    Referring now to the drawing, and in particular to  FIG. 1 , the source information is processed by the system, and extracted from the original storage medium, changed to the system format, and loaded into the system database. Emails and accounting records include both metadata and data, while phone logs typically only include metadata. 
         [0024]    Once the data is loaded into the system it is viewable from the system Viewer. The viewer is re-sizable, and can be made to fit the entire screen, or any part of it. The screen has four main areas, the display area, the filter area, the grouping area, and the action area. 
         [0025]    Referring also to  FIG. 2 , the main display area, or “wagon wheel” is shown. The red dot in the center represents the person whose data is currently being viewed. When the system first comes up, it selects the person, or account, or phone number, with the most activity and sets up the view from their perspective. Each of the lines represents traffic between the current “target”, or selected person, account, or phone number, and everyone that person corresponded with, spoke to, or transferred money to. The numbers represent an attribute of the transaction. For E-mail, the default is the number of messages, but could be the size of the messages, or the number of attachments, for example. For accounting records, it could be the number of transactions, or the total dollar amount of transactions, while for phone records, it would be the number of phone calls, or the sum of the time spent on each call. Clicking on one of the outer circles re-centers the diagram, and displays the traffic from that point of view. 
         [0026]    There are three actions available by clicking on one of the lines connecting the inner and outer circles. Referring also to  FIG. 3 , left clicking the mouse on one of the lines will display a list of the emails, transactions, or phone calls between the endpoint entities. Referring now to  FIG. 4 , clicking on one of the listed emails will cause it to be displayed. From the individual message display, the message can be marked on of five statuses. Referring also to  FIG. 5 , the will be visible to other users of the system, and will cause the item to be noted in the proper category in the report, which is shown below. Right clicking the mouse on one of the lines will display a histogram of the emails, transactions, or phone calls grouped by months. Left clicking on one of the months will display a list of the emails, transactions, or phone calls between the endpoint entities in the given month, the list shown in  FIG. 3 . Clicking left on the list of emails causes the email viewer to display the selected email, as in  FIG. 4 . (example) &lt;control&gt; Left clicking on the line activates the function to export records. A dialog will pop up to select a directory, and then the messages, phone records or transactions represented by the line will be copied out to the specified directory. 
         [0027]    The filter area is in the upper right hand corner of the screen, and currently has two choices, “filter level” and Email Start/End. The filter level slider represents the minimum number of items to display. For example, moving the slider to “61” causes only line with 61 or more transactions to be displayed. This allows for easier viewing of the data, and allows the user to target those links with high levels of communications. This is shown in  FIG. 2 . Changing the Email start and end dates redraws the map so that only messages or transactions that occur during that time period are displayed. The date “1/1/4501” is arbitrarily assigned to emails that have been deleted and subsequently recovered by the E-mail recovery software used, so that the E-mail is valid, even if the date isn&#39;t. 
         [0028]    The grouping area has two options, a list of the E-mail addresses, account numbers, or phone numbers available and a grouping type checkbox. The list of names allows the user to group various E-mail addresses together. This allows two important functions. First, it allows the reviewer to put together mail that represents the same user into a single graph. For example, John A. Smith at Acme Labs may have multiple E-mail addresses like jasmith@acme.com, john.a.smith@acme.com, john.smith@acme.com, john@acme.com, jasmith1234@hotmail.com, “John A. Smith”, “John Smith”, “John”. This allows the user access to all the E-mail and connection to and from john smith, which provides a more complete view of his activities. This function can also be used to represent the activities of a group or company whose activities we would like to study. An example might be to select the addresses of the four employees associated with the purchasing function in order to determine which of them are in contact with a suspicious vendor, and quickly review the email traffic. Or we could highlight the addresses associated with the vendor, to get an idea of who they are dealing with in the company. Referring to  FIG. 6 , the “normal traffic” button displays information in the format previously discussed, displaying all connections from the targeted individual or group. Also referring to  FIG. 7 , the “group traffic” checkbox changes the display to only include email going between the selected individuals. So if we had four addresses selected, only five bubbles would be visible, one for the targets, and four destination bubbles. 
         [0029]    The action area contains the four buttons on the lower right hand corner of the screen. The redraw map button causes the screen to be refreshed, and is used after changes are made to the date or group selections. Referring to  FIG. 8 , the overview button displays a histogram of the individuals whose mailboxes was collected, and shows how many messages have been collected for each. Referring also to  FIG. 9 , left clicking on one of the bars displays another histogram with the mailboxes collected of that individual, and displays the number of messages associated with each. Referring to  FIG. 10 , the report button displays items that have been marked by the user. The default categories are “Relevant”, “Not Relevant”, “Hot” and “Privileged.” Items in a particular category can be exported by clicking the category at the top of the page, then clicking the “export files” button. The “done” button closes the application. 
         [0030]    The system consists of four parts; the Viewer, the Metadata store, the Data store, and the Workbench. These pieces are connected by network protocols, so that they can be deployed in any configuration, such as bundled on a single computer, delivered as a client server system, or split into an n-tier system with separate display, application, database, and file servers. The system works most efficiently as a client server application, so that is the preferred configuration, but the other options are available for very large datasets. 
         [0031]    Referring now to  FIG. 11 , which shows an overview of the system, the Workbench is a program that translates data from its native format into the system format. It can read from various email and flat file formats. In the case of emails, the workbench program extracts the header information, the addresses referenced, the attachments, and extracts the message body and attachments to the file system, where they are stored and can be accessed by system, as well as other programs, like Windows Search. Keeping the files in this format is an advantage, because it allows users to leverage other widely available technology. In the case of transactions, the system can accept either a flat file of journal entries or a connection to the source database. At present, we copy the information into a data store in a system database. This is usually desirable when the data is being used of investigative purposes. As an enhancement, we will connect to the source system directly. This will allow real-time data to be reviewed as the transactions happen. The workbench matches transactions from the journal entries in order to set up the links. For phone logs, the system reads the log or phone bill, and gets the links directly from the log. 
         [0032]    The main data store exists in two parts, a file based data store and a database based data store. The data store concept is independent of the actual storage medium, which may change as the system evolves. For example, e-mails are currently stored in the file system, with a separate file for each message and attachment.  FIG. 12  shows the storage structure. Messages are extracted and stored organized by case, custodian or user, mailbox name, year, and month. As the technology matures, this information may be moved into a database, and the messages may be kept in their native format. The database based portion of the main data store consists primarily of the transactional data, such as journal entries or phone records. These are currently copied into the system data store for use by the system. 
         [0033]    The metadata store consists of eight tables at present, which contain the information necessary to process email, transactions, and phone records. There are three tables exclusively for email, two for journal entries, and one for phone records. The source table contains summary information about what mailboxes, transactions, or phone logs were processed. These are populated by the Workbench program as data is imported into the system. 
         [0034]    The email tables consist of a header table, an attachment table, and an address table. The header table includes an individual message id, the name of the source mailbox, the name of the extracted message, the message subject line, the date the message was sent, and the hash signature of the message. The header table also includes a status element that indicates whether the message was reviewed, and has placeholders for attributes to be assigned to the record. At present, there are flags that get set if the message contains a social security number or a credit card.  FIG. 13  shows an entity relationship diagram of the database. 
         [0035]    From the foregoing it will be seen that this invention is well adapted to attain all of the ends and objectives hereinabove set forth, together with other advantages which are inherent to the apparatus. 
         [0036]    It will be understood that certain features and subcombinations are of utility and may be employed without reference to other features and subcombinations. This is contemplated by and is within the scope of the claims. 
         [0037]    As many possible embodiments may be made of the invention without departing from the scope thereof, it is to be understood that all matter herein set forth or shown in the figures of the accompanying drawings is to be interpreted as illustrative and not in a limiting sense. 
       SEQUENCE LISTING 
       [0038]    Not Applicable