Claus Atzenbeck

Incorporating data sources and methodologies for crime data mining

This paper investigates sources of crime data mining, methodologies for knowledge discovery, by pointing out which forms knowledge discovery is suitable for which methodology. Furthermore, it identifies which data sources should be used for which knowledge discovery form in crime data mining. Similarities and differences between crime data mining methodologies show that some forms of knowledge discovery are suitable for particular crime data mining methodologies. It is offered that selecting the appropriate methodology depends on whether general or specific tasks required or high volume of crime data to be prepared.

Emergent Structure and Awareness Support for Intelligence Analysis

Based on the emergent nature of terrorist groups, we propose spatial hypertext as a tool for intelligence analysts for representing, reasoning upon, and communicating information. Furthermore, we evaluate awareness as an important feature for analysts to realise hidden associations between various people or objects. Finally, we discuss our prototype Socs, a general spatial structure application with high level support for awareness, under the umbrella of intelligence analysis requirements.

How Much Similar Are Terrorists Networks of Istanbul

Most of terrorist groups cooperate, interchange knowledge, skills and materials used for attacks. Terrorist groups in Istanbul are categorized into three main groups within criminological viewpoint: extreme left (i.e. Marxist) groups, extreme right (i.e. Fundamentalist, Radical Islamist) groups, and separatist (i.e. ethnic, racist) groups. Crime ontology for terrorist groups in Istanbul is created by using their criminal history and choices such as selection of crimes, attacking methods and modus operandi. Terrorist groups of Istanbul are attached to this ontology as nodes connected to their attacks. A similarity measure (COSM) is developed according to this ontology. COSM results for Istanbul terrorist groups performed better than two common similarity measures, cosine and Jaccard. COSM similarity result is presented to domain experts in hierarchical clustering and they gave positive feedback. COSM, which is based on attributes of crimes, can also be applied to other types of social networks for measuring similarity.

Supporting emergent knowledge and team communication in police investigations

This paper focuses on police investigations conducted by small teams of officers as they usually work on solving violent crimes. Collaboration and communication are important aspects as well as connecting pieces of information that become known to the officers over time. This is an important application domain of knowledge management, and in particular hypertext. We present a prototypic application, Socs, that permits the intuitive connecting of information on a space. It supports emergent and dynamic knowledge structures, fosters communication, awareness and notification services, enables multiple trails of thought in parallel (i. e., thought experiments), as well as versioning with easy access to previous states. As a complement to the database and network analysis driven applications available today, we propose a tool for criminal profiling or crime scene analysis supporting small teams of officers in knowledge structuring and collaboration.

Linking and Organising Information in Law Enforcement Investigations

Law enforcement officers deal with various challenges regarding the management of information during an investigation. New information comes in frequently, some of it is uncertain, incorrect, or incomplete. Officers should be supported in developing interpretations of the provided information. Furthermore, it is beneficial (and demanded by some investigation methodologies) to record the progression of the analysis. In order to fulfill these requirements, we propose a spatial hypertext-based application, as part of an open framework. This enhances collaborative work on uncertain, incomplete, and frequently changing information structures and provides access to other applications used in investigations.

Constraints in spatial structures

People have become used to paper as an information carrier over thousands of years. Paper is usually easy to handle and has been adopted as a metaphor for information structures in computer applications. This article gives a brief overview of our analysis on real world bindings. We further compare those to some metaphor-based spatial structure applications. We conclude that the high abstract implementation level in spatial structure applications takes away additional metainformation that may be useful for the user to find information quicker.

Looking beyond computer applications: investigating rich structures

Spatial structure supporting applications offer an abstract level of what can be found in the real world. However, in many systems, objects are aligned straight, rotation is not possible, they can be resized easily and can hold more text than is visible on the screen. Paper and structures created with paper seem to be more limited: Straight alignment is not possible without spending much time; paper can hardly be resized without damaging it; and piles may fall down if they become too tall. However, a closer look shows that paper structures offer much more attributes and dependencies than any current spatial structure supporting application. In this article, we compare paper structures to a selection of computer applications. We argue that the observed small additions with paper carry information which improves finding and organizing.

Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Intelligence and security informatics

This paper focuses on police investigations conducted by small teams of officers as they usually work on solving violent crimes. Collaboration and communication are important aspects as well as connecting pieces of information that become known to the officers over time. This is an important application domain of knowledge management, and in particular hypertext. We present a prototypic application, Socs, that permits the intuitive connecting of information on a space. It supports emergent and dynamic knowledge structures, fosters communication, awareness and notification services, enables multiple trails of thought in parallel (i. e., thought experiments), as well as versioning with easy access to previous states. As a complement to the database and network analysis driven applications available today, we propose a tool for criminal profiling or crime scene analysis supporting small teams of officers in knowledge structuring and collaboration.

TouchStory: combining hyperfiction and multitouch

As multitouch phones and tablets become more popular, multitouch technologies receive increasing attention. The underlying interaction paradigm of such devices is the space on which objects are manipulated by the users fingertips. It is natural that hypertext narratives find their way from primarily mouse-driven interaction to spatial structures and visually rich presentations. In this article we propose three features for multitouch hypertext narrative applications: (i) Native multitouch support and direct manipulations of fictive objects; (ii) using the space as a structuring mechanism rather than a means for presentation; and (iii) supporting presentation of visually rich objects. Our prototype, TouchStory, is a novel tool specialized for authoring and reading hypertext narratives that integrates these features.

Interview with Wendy Hall

Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007. Her team invented the ground-breaking Microcosm hypermedia system, which pre-dated the Web, and for which a patent was granted. Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems. She is founding director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative, which was launched in 2006 as a long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT. She holds a number of prestigious leadership roles. She is currently senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and was President of the British Computer Society (2003-2004). She is a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) Council and Publications Board and also Vice-President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a member of IW3C2 and was executive chair of the 15th International WWW conference in Edinburgh in May 2006. In April 2007 she joined the Board of the British Library.