A Bespoke Forensics GIS Tool
This work solves the problem of inadequate geospatial analysis tools for crime investigators, but it is incremental as it adapts existing GIS concepts to a specific domain.
The paper addresses the unsuitability of existing GIS tools for specific forensic investigation needs by developing a bespoke tool tailored to law enforcement requirements, which has been deployed and evaluated in a Department with various applications and use cases.
Today a lot of digital evidences for crime investigation includes a geospatial component. This data comes from various sources such as smartphones, tablets, navigation systems, digital camera with global positioning system (GPS), etc. The geospatial data plays a crucial role in crime investigation such as helping to tracking suspects, profiling serial offenders, recognizing trends in criminal activities, just a few. Many techniques and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools have been used to extract, analyse and visualise geospatial data. However, in some specific circumstances, the existing tools are not suitable for use as they do not meet investigators needs. This paper presents a bespoke forensic GIS tool based on specific requirements of the investigators of a law enforcement Department. Firstly the paper discusses some existing forensic GIS tools and environments in practices, and then it presents some investigators requirements and show the unsuitability of the existing tools. The paper continues with the presentation of the system architecture of the new tool and its components. It also introduces various applications and use cases which have been deploying at the Department as an evaluation of the developed tool.