Associations
Associations show who appears with whom. When two subjects are repeatedly detected together, eConnect records the connection — and a graph of those connections is often what turns one person of interest into a group.
This page is about connections between subjects — people seen together. The Associations administration page is about links between modules, such as a camera to a register. They are unrelated.
The connections graph
The graph draws subjects as nodes and their connections as lines. A thicker or more prominent connection means more shared detections.
Start from a subject you care about and expand outwards. The useful finding is rarely the first connection — it is the person two steps away who connects to several of your subjects.
Building a useful graph
Graphs become unreadable quickly. Three controls keep them usable:
- Time period. Connections over a year are noise; connections over the fortnight of an incident are evidence.
- Expand selectively. Expand the nodes that matter rather than everything, or you will produce a picture of your whole population.
- Recalculate the layout when it becomes tangled, to reorganise spacing without re-querying.
Refresh Counts updates connection strengths after changing the period, without rebuilding the whole graph.
Reading a connection
Right-click a connection to see the detections that formed it — the source and target sightings that put these two people together.
Always do this before relying on a connection. Two people passing through the same entrance in the same minute every morning may be colleagues, strangers on the same bus, or genuinely associated. The detections tell you which; the line alone does not.
The graph records that two people were detected at similar times and places. It does not know whether they were together.
In a busy venue, co-occurrence happens constantly by chance. Treat the graph as a way of finding where to look, never as a conclusion about a relationship.
Saving a layout
Graph layouts can be saved and restored, so an arrangement worked out over an afternoon survives to the next session and can be picked up where it was left.
Subjects and vehicles
Associations also link subjects to plates, so a person can be connected to the vehicles they arrive in and a vehicle to its occupants. See A Plate Profile.
Where associations lead
Every node opens the subject profile behind it, and every detection leads to its footage. The graph is a way into the evidence rather than a substitute for it.
Your route through it is captured in the Workspace, so an association followed today can be revisited tomorrow or shared with a colleague.