Public Safety and Personal Security (hereinafter PSPS) refers to the welfare and protection of the general public and of individuals through prevention and protection from dangers affecting safety such as crimes, accidents or disasters. It is usually expressed as a governmental responsibility, but public safety division also other organisations (and volunteers) and not only police, emergency medical services, fire force, etc. In a broad sense PSPS refers to both public health and public security issues, hence is in itself a multi-domain sector that includes, among others, safety from criminal acts, safety from accidents, food safety, homeland security, emergency response, natural disaster management and environmental safety.
Currently there are lots of PSPS applications that are based on fragmented and domain-specific data and this hinders the potential of the PSPS service sector, since a slew of data sources (from other domains) could further enhance and add value in such baseline services, if properly processed and combined. However, the overall potential of efficiently analysing even a small portion of the available data is immense. Risk-based crime prediction techniques, including spatiotemporal regression, risk terrain models, and advanced seasonal decomposition and trend prediction methods are applied on such data to transform reaction to crime and other emergencies (i.e. fire) to proactive management.
AEGIS is attempting to unify the fragmented and domain-specific data that is hindering the PSPS service sector from improving both its performance and efficiency. To this end, AEGIS is addressing this problem using the dual technologies of Linked Data and Big Data. Linked Data technologies enable the integration of diverse data sources in a unified data model that is both human- and machine-readable. Big Data technologies enable the storage and analysis of increasingly larger amounts of data at low cost, using commodity hardware.
AEGIS delivers an integrated Big Data analytics platform targeting multiple business sectors and taking into consideration structured, unstructured & multilingual datasets, rejuvenates existing models and facilitates organisations in the Public Safety & Personal Security linked sectors to provide better and personalised services to their users. From the technology perspective, AEGIS targets to revolutionise semantic technologies in big data, big data analytics & visualisations as well as security and privacy frameworks by addressing current challenges & requirements of cross-domain and multilingual applications.
AEGIS offers novel services and applications that allow PSPS-related industries to generate: (a) more factual and evidence-based analytics, (b) improved decision support models, and (c) new business services focused on real-time data collaboration, knowledge sharing and notifications amongst the key stakeholders.
Although open data sources are leveraged toward enhanced PSPS services provision, the AEGIS data ecosystem is based on a trusted multi-level network, enabling proprietary and also private data sharing and seamless integration functionalities in a secure environment under clear terms.
