Semantic Information EXchange (SIEX)
The SIEX project aims at enhancing the quality of the information exchanged by Law Enforcement Agencies by offering a semantic engine that analyzes both requests and responses sent and received within the context of the Swedish Initiative. We are going to provide also all the necessary tools to help in automating the information and intelligence exchange by leveraging on existing technology platforms already in use by EU LEAs.
One of the complaints of the LEAs is that the forms defined by the Swedish Initiative for submitting and requesting information complicates the information exchange as they are deemed to be cumbersome. Our project will simplify the procedure by offering new tools for the compilation of the forms but the main added value will be the semantic engine that will make the exchanged data more clear and informative. Although the semantic analysis tries to extract the maximum amount of information from the data, we are going to take special care to the effects of the project on individual rights and freedoms and offer, if necessary, all possible remedies in accordance to the legislation of each MS.
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The Swedish Initiative
The Swedish Initiative is a legal framework that streamlines the existing ways of information exchange, by setting time limits and determining that conditions applicable to cross-border data-exchange should be no stricter than those regulating domestic access. The Swedish initiative complements existing instruments by regulating the exchange of information once it is known where the relevant information can be found. The Swedish Initiative determines strict time limits with which member states have to comply when responding to request for information. It only regulates the actual exchange of information but does not help the Member States in informing them if and where there is relevant information.
Despite the availability of guidelines about the implementation of Swedish Initiative (documents 9512/1/10 REV 1 DAPIX 59 CRIMORG 90 ENFOPOL 125 ENFOCUSTOM 36 COMIX346 + COR 1), several recent reports (Commission Staff Working Paper SEC 2011 593 and the Assessment of compliance about the Council Framework Decision 2006/960/JHA, n 13970/11) highlight that the Swedish Initiative Framework is not used as much as it could be. The majority of Member States state that they do not resort to the procedure of the Swedish Initiative on a regular basis for requesting information mainly because the forms for requesting and submitting information are considered complex and cumbersome.
With the SIEX project we aim at improving such situation by offering tools that can simplify the automation of the procedure and by enhancing the quality of the exchanged information using semantic technology so that the LEA may have a sizable advantage by adopting the procedures of the Swedish Initiative. The importance of pushing for a wider application of the Swedish Initiative has been stated also in a recent study (October 2012) on possible ways to enhance efficiency in the exchange of police records between the Member States (final report about EPRIS: the European Police Records Index System).
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Objectives
Overall objective is to develop a new model to help applying efficiently Swedish Iniative principles.
Specific goals:
- to define a domain ontology (Cybercrime will be the first use case) and to develop tools, based on semantic analysis, facilitating structuring of requests and answers between LEAs
- to conduct a pilot of the model on selected domains
- to involve (through ROS network) other EU LEAs in the testing activities
- to transfer the Project results to target groups at EU level
Proposed model represents a first-rate intelligent vision system: development of a comprehensive framework and innovative information model represents the instrument to accomplish the ambitious objective. The model will be technologically independent, thus facilitating transferability at EU level.
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Resources
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Consortium
Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo (IAC-CNR)The Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo "Mauro Picone" (IAC), is a public research institute of applied mathematics part of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) with four locations (Rome, Bari, Florence and Naples). The mission of the Institute is "to develop highly advanced mathematical, statistical and computational methods in order to solve, in a mostly interdisciplinary context, problems with strong relevance to society and industry". It has a long tradition of collaboration with other public and private organizations in modelling of complex phenomena, network, computer security and digital forensics. Moreover, IAC has extensive experience in the integration of software technologies.
Applications can be found in many fields having direct impact on the society such as engineering (material science, turbulence, Bose-Einstein condensation, microflows), medical sciences and biology (medical image processing, genomics, the human immune system, blood flow), environment (analysis of satellite data for earth observation, modelling icefield processes on polar lithosphere), The Institute has its own computing infrastructure (high end servers equipped with Graphics Processing Units) and a widely recognized experience in the field of parallel processing, optimization and data visualization. The Institute has been involved as a partner in a number of European Projects (STREP, NOE, etc.) and received grants from (among the others) Google, Nvidia, and EXA corporations. The Institute has also an intensive education program with PhD students, PostDoc and young researchers coming from other countries to work and complete their education and training.
Arma dei CarabinieriThe Arma dei Carabinieri is the national military police of Italy, in its dual role as a Police and Armed Force is ever present in the lives of the citizens it protects, from the largest city in Italy to the remotest village. The Arma dei Carabinieri HQs-ICT Ofc is a component of the Staff of the Carabinieri HQs delivering ICT strategies, plans, programs and managing ICT projects for all the commands.
Expert SystemExpert System (ES) is a leader in semantic technology, developing advanced solutions for companies and governments, and the creators of the patented COGITO semantic technology. The only Italian business to have supplied Microsoft with advanced technologies integrated in all their main products, ES has made “intelligent” knowledge management of unstructured information its core business.
COGITO, developed by a team of professional linguists, programmers and language engineers, is ES’ linguistic platform that understands the semantic aspects of language and provides a conceptual representation of the meanings. This semantic approach enables a rapid and complete organization of unstructured information and is now the most innovative and effective answer to any problem encountered during research, filtering, classification, mining and discovery.