An extensible platform for the forensic analysis of social media data

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Visualising data is an important part of the forensic analysis process. Many cell phone forensic tools have specialised visualisation components, but are as of yet able to tackle questions concerning the broad spectrum of social media communication sources. Visualisation tools tend to be stove-piped, it is difficult to take information seen in one visualisation tool and obtain a different perspective in another tool. If an interesting relationship is observed, needing to be explored in more depth, the process has to be reiterated by manually generating a subset of the data, converting it into the correct format, and invoking the new application. This paper describes a cloud-based data storage architecture and a set of interactive visualisation tools developed to allow for a more straightforward exploratory analysis. This approach developed in this tool suite is demonstrated using a case study consisting of social media data extracted from two mobile devices