Graph Visualization of Legal Business Structures

Abstract: Visualization of complex data is a challenging topic. Data are often stored in spreadsheets making it difficult to get an overview of otherwise inaccessible information. Visualization of data is necessary for getting an understanding of complex structures. Organizations, among them financial institutions, nowadays consist of large owner structures and legal structures. Visualization of these structures is a challenging task due to the many levels of complexity within these structures.This report presents a visualization prototype of the legal business structures of financial institutions. The primary function of this prototype is to facilitate the understanding of complex legal business structures that would be hard to comprehend only from spreadsheets. The development of the prototype was performed using Python and NetworkX and the visualization was constructed as a graph representation. The evaluation of the prototype was conduced with semi-structured interviews together with a demonstration. The evaluation indicated that the utility of the visualization prototype concept can be further improved. The results suggests that a prototype is vital and is of good use for facilitating understanding of data.