Why filters?

Filters are your first analytical tool to reduce the noise and SEE what matters to you.

When saved to a view your filter settings also define the type and area of events as well as the interests for which you will get alerts. Visualizing your alerts settings with history first allows you to check what alerts and volume to expect.

How to use filters?

You can filter data to be visualized for analysis or to be used in alerts. To use them open the respective filter, make your choice and click "Apply" to activate them on your screen.

You have the following filters in SEE:

Countries, e.g. to see/get only interests or events for the selection.
Interests, define by type, search term, tag or manually which interest to see or get alerts for (if you later create an alert).
Keywords, to filter events by your personal topics or key words in addition to categories.
Event categories and severity, e.g. to restrict or exclude certain categories or severity levels for focus.
Data Providers
Time (applies to view only, not alerts).
Shapes, to filter for data in only specified areas on the map.

Use Case: Monitoring European Political Protests

As an intelligence analyst for a global corporation, you are tasked with monitoring political protests that could disrupt company operations in Europe. To streamline your focus, you use the Country Filter to include only France, Spain, and Germany, where your company has key offices and supply routes. Next, you refine your data with the Interests Filter, focusing on locations tagged as "HQ" and "Critical Routes" to ensure that only essential areas are visible on your map. To further hone in on relevant incidents, you add keywords like "political protest," "strike," and "demonstration" with an OR relationship, making sure that events matching these specific terms are captured.

You then adjust the Event Categories to prioritize high-severity events (this step is not necessary, as keywords act as filters), specifically including categories like "Civil Unrest" and "Economy, Business & Society" while excluding less pertinent ones. Finally, if you are interested in analyzing the history of such protests define your time filter of choice. To properly judge on likelihoods or recognize patterns you should choose at least one, if not two years of history. Once your filters are set, you save the configuration as a View titled "European Protests Monitoring," allowing you to easily revisit, share, and set alerts based on this setup. This efficient use of filters helps your team stay ahead of disruptions, enabling quick, informed decisions to protect your operations. For further details, refer to the article titled "SEE - Filters."

Save settings - Views

Once you have customized the filters and map type according to your needs, you can save your setting as a View in order to use them later, share with colleagues or to create an alert.

To do this, click on "View" button and then select "Save view".

Deep dive on Filters

Find a detailed description below how each filter works along with ideas how to use them.

For all filters you can reset your current settings in any filter by clicking the little circular arrow icon on the top right.
To reset all filters at once use “Clear All” in the filter bar.
To activate them click "Apply" at the bottom of the respeective filter menu.

Countries

The Country Filter is an easy way to narrow down your data collection to one or several countries.

When you select a country, such as Germany, only events and interests in Germany will be displayed on the map or list views.

After making your selections, simply hit "Apply" to see the filtered results.

Interests

The Interests Filter allows you to focus your view on specific interests, whether they have been created by you or shared with you. Only the interests you select will be shown on the map or list views.

Tabs Point/Area/Route: These tabs allow you to focus exclusively by interest type. When you select one, the other category will not be displayed.

Search Functionality: The search bar allows you to search for interest and single or bulk select them based on your search term.

Tags: Use the little funnel icon to filter interest by tag. Tags are a powerful tool to structure your interest e.g. by business, function, etc. (see “Interest Management” )

Once your are happy with your selection click on “Apply”.

All your interests are also accessible from the top left bar, where you can manage and visualize them in different formats.

Note: 📝 Interest filters applied on the main filters will also be applied to the interest management menu and vice versa.

Keywords

The Keywords Filter allows you to further refine your data by defining specific monitoring terms required in an event report in addition to the other filters (AND relationship). Only events matching your key word conditions will be dispalyed /alerted.

You can define the relationship between the terms entered using:

OR: The results will include events that match any of the selected keywords.

AND: The results will only include events that match all of the selected keywords.

NOT: The result will not include events including any of the terms specified. Use this option to exclude certain terms, helping to filter out unwanted noise.

Activating Keywords: Type the key word and either select from the drop down (if already used previously) or press Enter after typing to add the key word. The keyword only is only active once it appears as a chip in the filter list.

Click “Apply” to activate keywords as filter.

💡 User Tip:

For multi-word terms (like “Fridays for Future”) write the term without a space, like “fridaysforfuture”, see the screenshot.

Event Categories

The Category and Severity Filter is a combination filter that allows you to fine-tune your data by selecting event categories of interest and/or specifying the severity level for all are individual categories.

Global Slider: You can use the global slider to set a uniform severity level across all categories simultaneously. This is a quick way to apply a general filter to all event types.

Individual Adjustments: Alternatively, you can also adjust the severity level for category individually.
For example, you might set all categories to "Medium-High" using the global slider, then make specific changes for categories that need different severity levels (higher or lower).

Additionally, individual categories which are not relevant to your specific case can be deselected.

💡 User Tip:

You may want to start your analysis broad in order to get the overall picture first. Then look at the situation by specific categories or e.g. excluding low severity levels.

💡 User Tip:

You may want to focus alerts on events which matter most and are likely to have an impact on your operations. Hence you can restrict your view (the basis for your alert) by selecting only specific categories or raise severity levels of less important categories (meaning: exclude low level events) to reduce the noise. This is especially useful, when your alert is global and not interest (proximity) controlled, i.e. interest filter is toggled off to get e.g. all “terrorism" events of "major" severity, worldwide”. Have a look at the historic data to judge the content and volume to expect, fine-tune again before creating the alert. Depending on your sources, low level infrastructure and cyber tend to be particularly noisy and are less suitable for standard global alerts.

Data Providers

The Data Providers Filter compiles all available data sources, allowing you to control which providers contribute to your view/alerts.

Selection Options: You can choose to:

Select All: Include data from all available providers.

Select Specific Providers: Pick and choose the providers that are most relevant to your needs, allowing you to tailor your alerts to your preferred sources.

Select None (not possible for alerts): Exclude all providers, which might be a useful starting point for a new filter strategy or when doing an interest based briefing view.

💡 User Tip:

“Community” are events added by the Creolytix community. This can be events your colleagues post internally or also events posted “Public” by any Creolytix user.

Time

The Time Filter allows you to select specific timeframes for your data, either by choosing pre-defined periods or by manually selecting dates with a calendar picker. This way you can analyze or compare events in a precise time window or period.

A screenshot of a phone

Description automatically generated

Pre-Defined Periods: You can quickly choose from pre-set time intervals, such as past 1hr (default), 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, etc. from the date and time your are now.
- Note: Period time filters are rolling. This means, when you select "1 day” and save it as a view, the view will always show data from the last 24 hours whenever you apply it.
Selecting an Exact Period: If you need data for a specific, fixed timeframe, use the "Select Period" option to manually choose dates with the calendar picker.
Time in Alerts: Alerts ignore the time filter set for a view. You will receive all new events matching your filter criteria.

Shapes

The shape filter is a great tool for ultimate focus, e.g. when creating views for presentations or live briefings.

Using your preferred shape (radius or polygon for manually defined shapes) you can define exact areas on the map for which you want to display data.
On apply all other data will be disregarded. All other filters apply as usual.

Use Case: You want to show events within 5km distance from your headquarters in the past year. After selecting your categories of interest and the timeframe you may use the radius shape, click on your headquarters location and drag the radius to 5km, click apply. As a result you will see only the events within this radius.

Use a polygon to show events e.g. around a critical route.

Orientation - Modules and Features