Visualizing social/criminal networks often emphasizes on the relational aspect only, overlooking the temporal aspect. One reason for this is the difficulty of automatically organizing networks nicely in the given space in real time. However, by disregarding the temporal aspect of social/criminal networks, sometimes crucial knowledge and insights can be missed in analyzing the networks. Another lacking feature of many existing social network visualization tools is interaction. Visual analytics principles include visual representations and interactions techniques, so that investigators can interact with such visual representations and intuitively perceive emerging patterns of the networks. Our proposed framework, Dynalink tries to include such features: visualizing the temporal aspect of social/criminal networks with animation and enabling interactions with all the nodes of the networks. By applying the spring embedder algorithm, Dynalink organizes the networks nicely in the given space. Many visual cues such as node size, color, and wiggly effects help investigators easily detect specific networks that need an attention. Our case study demonstrates some practical uses of Dynalink in analyzing cooffending networks. The interactive and temporal visualization of criminal networks is an enabling factor for analytical reasoning in any criminal investigations by law enforcement
and intelligence agencies