Download SOCIS: A Prototype Scene of Crime Information System

SOCIS: A Prototype Scene of Crime Information System
Khurshid Ahmad,
Department of Computing, University of Surrey,
Guildford, Surrey.
GU2 7XH
The Scene of Crime Information System project, sponsored by the UK Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council, is investigating this link through the construction of a computer
system - the prototype Scene of Crime Information System (SOCIS). This is a three-year collaborative
project that began in 1999, involving the Universities of Sheffield and Surrey, working closely with
four UK Police Forces - Hampshire, Kent, South Yorkshire and Surrey – and together with the
Metropolitan Police Scientific Support College. The prototype can be made available to Police Forces
and other enterprises involved in the administration of justice. The system has been developed in the
Java programming language and is based on a 3-tier architecture including a client, a server and a
database and can thus be accessed via local Intranets as well.
The SOCIS system can be regarded as a variant of image retrieval systems in that it uses not
only the vision-specific features of an image, particularly colours in the image and some data about
possible shapes of objects, but also uses the terms found in a collateral description of the image. The
SOCIS system has three other distinguishing features: First, the system can extract specialist terms and
organise the terms in a conceptual hierarchy; second, the system has a component that can
autonomously learn vision-specific features of an image and learn to associate the keywords used in the
description of the image with the vision-specific features; and third, identify meaning-bearing relations
amongst the objects depicted in the image.
The SOCIS project can be described as a user-oriented project that is at the same time
investigating an open-ended question - the relationship between an image and its description.
Biographical Note: Khurshid Ahmad is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Head of
Department of Computing, University of Surrey. He works in the areas of information extraction and
neural computing. His work has concentrated on extracting terms automatically from texts,
summarizing large texts and on building neural computing systems comprising a number of neural
networks.
The SOCIS project has two principal investigators: Khurshid Ahmad at Surrey and Yorick
Wilks at Sheffield. The research officers working on the project are: Bogdan Vrusias (Surrey), Horatio
Saggion and Katerina Pastra (Sheffield). Mariam Tariq is working on her doctoral dissertation for
conceptually organising a set of candidate terms extracted from texts. Chris Handy is looking at the
variability in the description of images. Both Mariam and Chris are at the University Surrey. John
Armstrong, Head of Scientific Support, Surrey Police, chairs the SOCIS Round Table. The Round
Table includes Andy Hawley (South Yorkshire Police), Tim Curtis (Hampshire Police), Jim Fraser
(Kent Police), David Ince (Principal Scientific Support College, Metropolitan Police). Bob Milne
(Metropolitan Police Forensic Intelligence Unit). Enterprises that have attended some of the Round
Table meetings include Solcara PLC, CME Software Systems, Advantage Systems, CMG Admiral and
the Forensic Science Services.