Sunlight Foundation's latest launch, Poligraft, aims at making research easier through providing obvious political trends surrounding information. In Ellen Miller's description on the Sunlight Foundation Blog, Poligraft "extracts text from any news story, blog post or news release and runs it through a filter to determine the "influence connections" between the entities listed in that text."

Closely linked to Transparency Data, Poligraft can serve either as a user-driven website or as a bookmarklet, "offering an interactive snapshot of the connections between the players in the text you want to review." Although Miller admits that the tool is still far from perfect, it is also far from useless and Megan Taylor of PoynterOnline writes more about how journalists get best use out of the tool.

"Information is public record, but it's never easy to dig through," she says. "I can see how news organizations could apply the Poligraft model to any type of story -- crime, business, anything for which additional context could be useful. For example, a crime story sidebar could search for names of people involved, addresses, type of time and display the information in a sidebar. It's a twist on the crime map."

Miller described Poligraft as "pretty close to a dream come true" and Taylor agrees with the 'pretty close' rather than the 'dream come true', saying that the tool could use some improvement. "As simple as the Poligraft tool is," she writes, "users need a certain amount of background knowledge to really benefit from it...I realize that you're expected to read the story, remember the names, and look over in the sidebar for context." Poligraft's flaws notwithstanding, she believes that "it beats looking up contributions one by one - and it may highlight a connection that would be otherwise overlooked."

TechCrunch's CrunchBase Widget is a similar tool, which can be customized and added to websites. It provides information and a business summary of organizations mentioned in a story.

Source: PoynterOnline, blog.sunlightfoundation.com