Working with your own data: tips and tricks to kickstart your analytical task
Our recent articles mostly tell about Lampyre’s OSINT capabilities. This one will be different as it describes the data analysis side of it. Today you’ll get to know about:
- Importing custom data
- Data filtering
- Adding custom visualization templates
- Visualizing your data
How to import custom data?
If you want to start a new investigation:
Launch Lampyre and select Import file:
Pick a file with your data. It can be either comma-separated values in .txt or .csv formats, or Excel spreadsheet (.xls or .xlsx). Here you can also:
- add a tag to the imported file,
- choose several files to be uploaded at once,
- extract column names from the first row,
- set a delimiter,
- select whether to discard duplicate rows if found,
- enable data editing in Lampyre.
After importing a file, you can see your custom data as a spreadsheet. In our example we took a list of real estate agents from Singapore government’s public data portal:
If you need to add your data to an existing investigation:
Open an investigation file you want to use, open the Import window, then choose Upload to investigation:
Double-check to ensure that your data has been imported correctly. Right-click your imported file and choose Header. You will see data types for each column. For instance, here you might want to check that your date values are imported as Datetime — it will make filtering by date much easier.
If you right-click your imported file and choose Parsing, Lampyre will show you the total number of data rows imported, as well as the number of skipped and empty rows:
Data filtering
Before visualizing your data, you can apply filters. Find a column with data you want to filter. Click on a small icon under the column name and choose from plenty of filtering options — below is a list for string data types:
Once you’ve selected a filtering method, input a value to the right of the icon. Same works for columns that contain date/time values — you can set or exclude certain dates and date ranges.
If you click on a column header, your data will be sorted — click again to reverse the order. Click on a filter icon right next to the column name to find and pick unique values from the list (for string data types) and pick dates, months or years of your interest (for date/time data types):
Of course, several filtering conditions can be applied at the same time.
There’s also another way of filtering data. If you click on the Edit filter icon at the bottom of the window, you will be able to combine several conditions as well as see all the filters you’ve already set for the table. There’s one more useful button near the Edit filter: click on it to choose from the recent filters.
Adding custom templates
To place your custom data on a graph, you need to interlink your data first. To do that, click on the Add creation template button in the right corner below your table:
Name your custom template, then select Add object on top:
To create custom object type, specify the object type name and choose the picture by clicking on an icon above:
You can also choose from existing object types — in our example we will use Organization. When done, set up the attributes. If you chose to create your own object type, you will have to specify an attribute name by choosing it from the list or entering a custom name, as well as select data type, as per screenshot below:
For both custom and default object types, the key step is to assign the columns to the corresponding attributes, as in the example below, where we assign a column containing estate agent names:
Repeat same steps to add a second object. When finished, create a link between them — just hold Ctrl button, select both and click Add link on top. Make sure you set the correct link direction:
When done, click OK. You can always edit and delete your custom template using the button next to the Add creation template.
Visualizing your data
Okay, now let’s visualize what we have here. In our example we selected a list of salespersons and filtered them by date. We click the Schema button and select our custom template:
It will show us who of the salespersons work for each real estate agency and whether anybody of them works for two agencies at the same time — which is not our case here, as we see below:
All elements here can be rearranged manually, or you can change from several default presentation options — just right-click on your schema and choose from Sorting or Layout menus!
In conclusion: these are the basics for working with your own data in Lampyre. But there is much more to tell you about! In our coming posts we’ll tell about putting your data on a map and some other cool visualization features that Lampyre has, so stay tuned!
