A Semantic Engine and an Ontology Visualization Tool for Advanced Crime Analysis

Abstract Crime has been and still is one of the major threats and issues for every government and society around the world. Nowadays, a new generation of (cyber)criminals exploits modern and state-of-the-art technology and tools, especially social media channels, in order to achieve their malicious purposes. Thus, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), analysts and security practitioners are facing the need to engage new methods and tools which can support them in the fight and prevention of crime by minimizing the prediction and response time. This paper focuses on two specific functionalities of a crime prediction and fighting software framework which assists LEAs to adopt and utilize emerging technologies such as Data mining and Big Data tools, Semantic Analysis, Visual Intelligence and more in the context of their everyday operations. In this light, the authors of this paper present an innovative Semantic Engine with a person fusion tool as well as an ontology visualization tool as parts of a discussed framework. Both of these tools are presented in detail in separate sections so that the readers can understand better their architecture and their integration into this common framework alongside with other tools. These two tools use state-of-the-art components and software libraries in order to offer robust and future proof solutions for LEAs. Also, they can be integrated and expanded in future research and commercial projects both as independent tools as well as parts of other integrated frameworks.