Supporting emergent knowledge and team communication in police investigations

Abstract

This paper focuses on police investigations conducted by small teams of officers as they usually work on solving violent crimes. Collaboration and communication are important aspects as well as connecting pieces of information that become known to the officers over time. This is an important application domain of knowledge management, and in particular hypertext. We present a prototypic application, Socs, that permits the intuitive connecting of information on a space. It supports emergent and dynamic knowledge structures, fosters communication, awareness and notification services, enables multiple trails of thought in parallel (i. e., thought experiments), as well as versioning with easy access to previous states. As a complement to the database and network analysis driven applications available today, we propose a tool for criminal profiling or crime scene analysis supporting small teams of officers in knowledge structuring and collaboration.