Getting started with Octostar
Welcome to Octostar, a platform designed to make investigations and data-driven decision-making simpler, faster, and more effective. Whether you're working in law enforcement, cybersecurity, corporate investigations, or financial crime detection, Octostar provides the tools to streamline your work and uncover critical insights.
Intro: what is Octostar?​
At its core, Octostar is an Investigative and Decision Intelligence platform. It combines powerful data analysis tools with a user-friendly interface, helping professionals gather, process, and act on information from multiple sources.
Here are the main ideas behind how Octostar works:
- All-in-One, Fusion Platform: Instead of juggling different tools and systems, Octostar brings everything you need into one place. From searching data to analyzing patterns to writing reports, it’s all integrated.
- Customizable Tools (Apps): Octostar works like a smartphone for investigations—apps can be tailored to specific tasks. Need to analyze social media activity or spot suspicious financial transactions? There’s an app for that, and you can even build your own.
- Smart Use of Data: Octostar connects to various data sources—structured databases, documents, media files, and even real-time streams. It uses advanced AI to help you make sense of it all, whether you’re looking for trends, links, or alerts.
- Built for Action: Once you’ve gathered your insights, Octostar helps you act on them with tools for creating reports, building profiles, and collaborating with your team.
How Octostar Works​
- Connect Your Data: Bring in information from different sources—your files, databases, or even external providers. Octostar’s tools help you organize and link it all.
- Analyze and Investigate: Use powerful search, graphing, and AI tools to explore your data. Find connections, patterns, or anomalies with just a few clicks.
- Create and Collaborate: Document your findings with built-in report-writing tools, share insights with your team, and work together in real-time.
- Customize and Expand: Add apps or tweak existing ones to fit your exact needs, ensuring the platform grows with your challenges.
Highlighted feature​
- Virtual Knowledge Graph connectivity: Easily see how people, places, and events are connected trough different systems
- Search across everything, with AI. Use AI capabilities to find "indications of crimial behaviours", search across all your connected databased and remote services.
- Multimedia Capabilities: Upload videos, audio, images, and documents for analysis—Octostar can handle it all. Search for faces or similarities in pictures and videos.
- No-Code/Low-Code Apps: Adapt the platform to new scenarios without needing a developer. Roll out new advanced capabilities in hours, not months
Let's go!​
Let's now dive into the Octostar homepage (note that your deployment may differen considerably)
In the image above we can see
- The Workspace area: here you can see the currently open workspaces. Workspaces are mostly used to separate content of different investigations, but sometimes they're used for other purposes (see later description). If you dont see anything in the workspace area, just press the + sign to open one or more from those you have access to (or create one)
- The window area: shows windows for any specific purpose, e.g. a document opened from the Workspace area is displayed in a tabbed window here. Notice that tabs have context menus (the 3 dots) which give you access to functions related to the content that is being displayed.
The window area is quite flexible. Dragging a tab to a the side will put windows side by side or in different docked positions. Just try!
- The APP launcher menu: just click to have access to the list of currently accessible APPs.
- The connected data section: gives you access to all the data currently in octostar either via a tree of concepts of via the search engine (recommended)