Looking for context within your investigation using Mercure

Mercure has long been regarded as the telecoms analytics tool of choice. Flanderin Technologies (formerly Ockham Solutions) continuously works to improve their solution by listening to feedback and requests from users. One of the requests is to be able to create a clear overview of important events, communications, transaction data or other items around one specific moment in time/one specific event.

This article explains how to do this using the 'Context Lookup' functionality in Mercure

Determining moment in time
To use the Context Lookup query, it is important to determine at what point within your data you want to look for the information you need. Regardless of the data type, you can search for an event that occurred within, before or after a certain number of hours or minutes. An example for clarification:

From an extraction, you have found a text message talking about committing a crime. You want to find out if more information can be found in the hours preceding and following said text. For this, you can search all imported data sources within Mercure including the available historical data, bank data, ANPR and financial transaction data. Which data sources you want to include in creating an overview timeline is up to you.

Setting criteria
Once you have determined which event you want to perform the context lookup for, it is important to adjust the view so that the rows are split. This creates the possibility of looking up the context in the individual rows at the chosen time.

In the example above, a transaction was traced where €20,000 in cash was withdrawn. This cash withdrawal is very conspicuous and falls outside the usual financial pattern of the person under investigation.

To trace the steps that took place before and after this recording, events, communications and other transactions are charted. When setting the criteria, you have the option to choose which data to include in the query.

When you choose the 'between all entities' option, you are given the option to select all different types of data sources.

In the scope of the query, tick the claims you want to include in the query.

In the criteria window, you can specify whether you want to see the result based on a time restriction or not and, if so, within how many hours/minutes you want to restrict the results. The maximum number of hours you can look up using a time restriction before or after the event is 24 hours.

Reading result

The results window displays the data found within the selected claims, based on the set criteria. The display is based on chronological order where the selected item is shown in bold.

The details column shows which events, communications or transactions took place before and after the €20,000 cash withdrawal. From this view, you can go directly to the data file where the result was found, allowing you to retrieve any additional information, such as the content of a text or the identity of the other party.

Contact
If you have any questions about above procedure in Mercure or if you would like to know what Mercure can do for you, please contact us.