Screenshots from FNA prototype

For the last couple of months we have been working hard on the new version of FNA. FNA is a platform for analyzing, exploring and visualizing financial networks (download FNA Info sheet).

Working with large (often messy) datasets is hard, so our focus has been to make it as easy and intuitive as possible. Thus FNA has features starting from cleaning and validating data, calculating network metrics to eventually visualizing and modeling the analyzed system.

We now have a ‘functioning prototype’ almost finished. We are now ironing out a few details and it will be available online in about a month for everyone to try it out. Meanwhile the following screenshots provide a preview.

FNA is based on web technologies and runs on your browser. The server where the commands execute can be installed on your local desktop, on the company intranet or you can use the web version running on our servers.

In addition to the command line interface (Picture 1) already available in the previous version, you can now also give commands with mouse by point-and-click (Picture 2). The command line interface itself is improved with an ‘auto-suggest’ function. As working with different files is often a slowing factor in analysis, the new FNA integrates file management into the user interface (panels on the right).

Picture 1 : Command line user interface

Picture 2: Point-and-click user interface

A major new feature set are visualizations. First of all you can several different network layouts. Currently we have a force-directed network layout (Picture 3), arc layout and a geographic overlay of networks available (Picture 4). As these are based on JavaScript templates (the ones below use Protovis) it will be easy for us to add new ones on the fly. If you have more than one network in memory, a similar chart is automatically created for all networks allowing you to browse the results quickly visually. The layouts are interactive allowing you to select, zoom and get more details on the network elements. You can also export them keeping interactivity.

Picture 3: Force-directed network layout

Picture 4: Geographic network layout

There are also many more familiar chart types (line, pie, bar, scatter plot, etc) available which can show statistics from any arc, vertex or network properties.

If you would like to learn more about FNA or participate in developing and testing it, please get in touch with us.