Tracking ballistics across Europe
Law enforcers can certainly benefit from a high-tech system that shares information about gun use and connects critical data across the EU. The EU-funded project 'Strategic pan-European ballistics intelligence platform for combating organised crime and terrorism' (Odyssey) has helped establish such a platform. Drawing on data from different sources to consolidate critical information in one main data repository, the project investigated how information about gun crimes can be shared. It devised European standards for ballistics data collection, storage and sharing, exploiting high-tech processes for mining data and extracting knowledge on gun crime across the EU. Such a system would be able to flag suspicious situations, enhance cooperation among authorities and strengthen security. The project team met with user communities, researchers and developers to discuss their research and to build the intelligence platform. After in-depth work on integrated data storage, querying and mining components of the system, the team designed an effective model and incorporated security features such as user authentication and authorisation. By the end of the project the team had produced an advanced prototype representing a secure, information communications technology (ICT) platform to share information about serious crime and terrorism involving firearms. It also developed strategies to exploit the project's results and to manage the intellectual property of this powerful new system. Once the system is successfully tested in police facilities, it is set to, raise anti-crime tools and counter-terrorism technologies to new heights.