Galway-based Siren, the all-in-one investigation platform company this week announced details of a new patent and the release of Siren 13.4.
Dr. Renaud Delbru, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Siren, said the most recent patent stands out as a one-of-a-kind offering in the market, reaffirming our commitment to innovation. Speed and scale are pivotal in so many critical investigations, I am particularly pleased that our technology, and specifically Siren 13.4, is making an increasing impact in Public Safety and Law Enforcement globally.”
Siren’s new patent pending technology allows analysts to conduct larger searches faster, and without the need for additional IT systems or processing power. The new analytics capability has boosted Siren’s overall performance, providing accelerated data retrieval and enhanced analysis capability for analysts.
The 'join operation' is a critical function within a database system, enabling the correlation and retrieval of data from two distinct data-sets, using a shared attribute or relation. Traditionally this “joining” process can prove challenging and resource-intense. Siren’s new join addresses the problem by introducing an intelligent approach to partitioning data records prior to executing the join operation.
What sets this approach apart is its innovative data organization. It effectively removes excessive network costs and inefficiencies by reducing data record duplication and optimizing the data exchange phase of the join operation.
When it comes to practical application, Siren 13.4 and the new join provide immediate benefits across a spectrum of scenarios using large scale, distributed data-sets like social media data, high volume financial transaction data, or detailed scientific research data.
The latest patent application, International (PCT ) Application No PCT/EP2023/059801, builds on a history of technical advances Siren has made in the fields of national security and public safety in relation to search and investigation functionality. Previous United States patents include "Method for Efficient Backend Evaluation of Aggregates on Composite Relationships in a Relationally Mapped ER Model", "Optimization of Database Sequence of Joins for Reachability and Shortest Path Determination", "Distributed Join Index for Shared-Nothing and Log-Structured Databases" and a European application for "Distributed Join Index for Shared-Nothing and Log-Structured Databases".
The latest version of Siren includes a number of visualization, usability and performance features to enable smarter and more coherent investigations.
13.4 includes the following enhancements:
Siren graph browser
The Siren Graph Browser is the most sophisticated visualization available in the market. It displays documents as nodes and the data relations appear as links between the nodes. In 13.4, changes have been made to the back end libraries to remove outdated dependencies and provide more robust graph features. Graph performance improvements include:
Tooltip handling
Faster Timebar
Enhanced Contextual menu
Graphs can now be exported in high-resolution
Feature to detect if an image exported from the graph browser may be of portrait or landscape orientation
Graphs on the sidebar
For the user’s convenience Siren visual graphs are now listed and easily accessed from the sidebar of the Siren main menu. A link to each can be directly shared with other Siren users. Analysts can now add records to a graph without having to open it first facilitating the merging of different graphs together.
Change the directions of entity table relations
The direction of a relation may now be changed, enabling better data modeling and representation on the graph.
Investigate Objects API
This API allows for better automated deployments and scriptable configuration of the data model.
Auto-completion in the script editor
Auto-completion has been added to the Siren scripting editor to make it easier and faster to create custom Siren API scripts as well as templates.
Template and reporting
The latest release includes a Record Tables template to generate and download reports in formats such as PDF, DOCX, and PPTX. This makes scripts easier to write and faster to load, while also allowing templates to be rendered in Record Tables, in addition to the Record Viewer.
Sidebar lock and unlockUsers may now lock and unlock the sidebar. When unlocked, the sidebar items can be reordered. When locked, nodes from dashboards can be dropped on appropriate visualizations.
Intuitive labeling and description for Field Names in the Entity TableAn intuitive label and description for field names has been introduced in the entity table. This will enable the analysts to maintain a data catalog, annotating all fields available in Siren.
