Creativity Greenhouse: SeRTES

The SeRTES project aims to provide a set of requirements/specification of a visualisation to show scenarios, 'the whole' rather than 'the parts', how issues in a technological enabled society are dynamically related i.e. how entities, individuals, institutions, laws, and risks dynamically interact within the virtual realm. The research would also abstract key constructs (of entities, links and flows) for the visualisation that allow 'non-obvious' representation that is parsimonious and powerful. We will develop a skeletal representation and demonstrator that could have richness and layers added over time, beyond the current project scope. The project will also devise ways of extracting (queries), from the visualisation, ways it can be used, e.g. value risk, how to value stewardship, security, privacy, contingent values, trust and if there are useful inter-, intra-layer notions of 'trust domain' that can help us organize the architecture of the ecosystem to enable interactions, transactions, and ecosystem development. This queries would help support decisions, resulting in a tool that can be used by the policy makers, business leaders, and law enforcement officers to make intelligent decisions. The SeRTES project proposes to represent a 'tool of tools' that is truly trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural. Finally, the project sees its research as a seed-corn project and expects to seek more funding to add to the richness of the representation and develop a network of studies complementing this project.

This research will provide businesses, public institutions, providers of infrastructure and individuals with an understanding (a mapping) of the landscape of their digital realm.
Enterprise information systems are generating ever-increasing amounts of heterogeneous data and more of this data is moving in real time. Many automated features (e.g. data mining techniques) and analytic modelling engines are provided in many applications, however there remain many applications where human interaction (e.g. in form of judgement) is of great importance, which include: risk management, model exploration and validation, real-time operations and information security. A visual approach significantly facilitates the task and can improve productivity and efficiency. The users can explore large amounts of data, rapidly assimilate information from many sources, reason with it, understand it and create new knowledge based on it. With the right visual picture, people can make better decisions, faster, backed with more information. In addition, it is easier for people (e.g. business/data analysts) to scan, recognise, and recall images rapidly. Utilising the human brains "pattern recognition" feature, it can easily detect changes in size, colour, shape, movement, and texture very efficiently. The research will also provide a means of visualising the hidden, invisible connections (and barriers) which are created. Such visualisations will enable the reporting, researching and public-debating of the segregation, limitation, isolation and subjugation this realm creates for certain individuals and institutions. Visualisation and representation also helps in decisions and judgement made based on dynamic interactions to reduce cognitive overload that comes from managing in a complex environment. It would help to educate, innovate and promote joined-up working, and smoothing the workflow of market, government, society. Finally, visualisation helps us to better 'see' new communities forming within the social networking environments, assisting us in identifying linkages between real groups and virtual groups and allowing the assessment of the impact of technology-created emergence, and reconfiguration of new forms of institution, structure and governance. Academically, the research could demonstrate the potential of "cyberspace cartography". Such cartography could contribute to fields as diverse as computer science, science and technology studies, the law, management sciences, information systems, geography and the arts.
The SeRTES project aims conducting research and developing visual analytics tools taking the next step in interactive visualisation approaches through the incorporation of computational intelligence techniques which can help addressing the above mentioned challenges and provide added value to 'state-of-art' advanced visualisations approaches. The research team expect to be able to disseminate the findings of the research in the form of graphic visualisations to different publishing communities at the end of the project for major impact.