Linkurious Enterprise

Introducing the guest mode in Linkurious entreprise

November 9, 2018

In this article, we introduce the Guest mode: a feature of Linkurious Enterprise to share your graph data with occasional users through a simplified interface. You will learn what you can do with it, how to configure it and how to give people access.

 

A simplified visualization interface to share graphs with everyone

Have you ever wanted to give access to a visualization to a stakeholder who does not have a Linkurious Enterprise user account? To embed a visualization in an application such as an internal web portal?  While Linkurious Enterprise is great for analysts conducting in-depth investigations, the visualization of connected data may interest other people.

That’s where the Guest mode in Linkurious Enterprise comes in. This mode lets any stakeholder explore your graph database and access saved visualizations from a simplified interface in a read-only environment. In a few words, the guest mode is:

  • Simple: it offers a simplified interface accessible to all, including people who do not know what a graph is.
  • Customizable: you decide which features to enable in the Guest mode.
  • Embeddable: You can embed it directly in any web application, public or not.
  • Read-only: the data your share through the Guest mode cannot be altered by viewers.

Extend the benefits of graph technology beyond your investigation team

An interface specially designed for occasional users

With the Guest mode, bring the benefits of graph visualization to users working occasionally with connected data. Its simplified interface allows anyone to use it when needing to better understand complex data. For instance, an investment officer could easily inspect financial transactions exchanged between businesses without prior knowledge of graph analysis.

 

A tool that integrates everywhere to extend the capabilities of your platforms

The Guest mode fits where you need it, in your applications and your existing processes.  Your claims analysts use Linkurious Enterprise to investigate suspicious claims? Embed the Guest mode directly within their case management system and they can preview of the entities involved in a claim, without having to log onto yet another application.

 

A means to publicly share your data through interactive graph visualizations

Your organization maps networks and needs to publicly give access to the final visualizations to online visitors? Give them access to a web page embedding your Guest mode, they can browse your data graph in a tamper-proof web environment.

This is what the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) did. This organization conducts and supports basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases. They embedded a public instance in their resource portal in order to expose and share scientific graph data with other scientists.

NIAID public portal
NIAID public portal

Setting up the Guest mode in 5 steps

1) Enable Guest mode

The Guest mode is a feature that needs to be activated by an administrator. To do so, you enable the option in the panel “configuration”. Note that this will only activate a Guest mode for the active data source. You will need to re-iterate the process if you want a Guest mode on other sources.

Enable the Guest mode from the configuration interface

2) Assign a “read” or “custom” group rights to Guest mode users

When you enable the Guest mode, Linkurious Enterprise creates a generic “guest” user profile. This profile needs to be associated with a user group. You can choose from one of the options below depending on your access rights requirements:

  • Assign guest users to the read-only” access rights group: the read rights apply to all types of nodes and edges. Guest mode users will be able to read and interact with the entire database.
  • Assign guest users to a “custom” access rights group: narrow the reading rights to specific categories of nodes and edges by assigning a custom group to the “guest” user profile.

3) Configure the features of your interface

Administrators can add or remove from the interface all elements circled in red in the image by changing the true/false input in the configuration panel.

configure guest mode
Circled in blue are the configurable panels
  1. “uiWorkspaceSearch”: When set to “true”, searching nodes and edges in the graph is enabled.
  2. “uiExport”: the export feature
  3. “uiSimpleLayout”: When set to “true”: a unique “layout” button replaces the layout menu
  4. “uiLayout”: When set to true, the layout menu is available to choose and run layouts
  5. “uiDesign”: When set to true, the design panel is available to set colors, sizes and icons
  6. “uiFilter” When set to true, the filter panel is available to hide nodes and edges in the visualization based on rules

4) Embed your Guest mode interface

You can embed the Guest mode in existing web applications using an iframe. Add the HTML element to any web page or application and set the “src” attribute to the URL of the guest mode:

 <iframe src=”https://your-linkurious-instance.com/guest/?key=your-datasource-key” />

By default, accessing the /guest URL will load an empty guest mode workspace. You can programmatically generate URLs that lead to guest mode workspaces containing desired nodes and edges using URL parameters (see “Populate interface”).

5) Populate the interface

You can automatically load nodes and edges in the workspace using URL parameters. Below are the different possibilities:

These settings allow for a rich integration of the guest mode. You can easily use automatic URL generation to provide dynamic visualizations based on users’ actions (a search word or a click on a button). For further information, you can refer to the Linkurious documentation.

Integration Linkurious
Example of a Guest mode integration using URL parameters to dynamically generate visualizations

This feature offers a unique opportunity to bring the benefits of Linkurious Enterprise to every other team of your organization. Whether their goal is to quickly access the data context of a client, to explore in a simple way the objects attached to a claim, or to share a network of companies and shareholders with an audience, it should be a good fit. Don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us!

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