Developing a Judicial Cross-Check System for Case Searching and Correlation Using a Standard for the Evidence

Abstract

In a recent EU publication, a report commissioned by the European Union related to the Cross-border Digital Criminal Justice environment, a set of specific business needs have been identified. Some of the most relevant ones have been: i) the interoperability across different systems needs to be ensured, ii) the stakeholders need to easily manage the data and ensure its quality, allowing them to properly make use of it (e.g. use the data as evidence in a given case) and iii) the stakeholders investigating a given case should be able to identify links between cross-border cases. Therefore, solutions are needed to allow the stakeholder to search and find relevant information they need for the case they are handling. The study presents a set of solutions to address the highlighted needs, including a Judicial Cases Cross-Check system. Such a system should provide a tool being able to search for case-related information and identify links among cases that are being investigated in other EU Member States or by Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) agencies and EU bodies. To facilitate the development of the above solution, a standard representation of the metadata and data of the Evidence should be adopted. In particular the ontology Unified Cyber Ontology (UCO) and Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE), dedicated to the digital forensic domain, seems the most promising one to this aim and moreover it provides a structured specification for representing information that are analysed and exchanged during investigations involving digital evidence.