Evaluation of Intelligent Exploitation Tools for Non-structured Police Information

While already having at their disposal an array of advanced and task-specific tools for the gathering, dispersal and exploitation of highly structured information, the Belgian Federal Police (BFP) are now shifting attention to novel technologies for exploiting vast amounts of unstructured information sources, from which further knowledge could be obtained for analysis purposes. The aim of the INFO-NS research project is to provide an objective study of the applicability of mining and decision support tools for the BFP. More specifically, it is studied whether information retrieval, extraction and classification tools might leverage intelligence and decision support while exploiting the information that is contained in vast amounts of free text material and linking it with any coexisting, structured data sets that are currently in use. This article provides an insight into the requirements of the BFP with regard to a like decision support system, and presents one aspect of evaluation criteria aimed at testing the functional conformity of such tools against a set of functional requirements.