Next the officer clicks on "arrest history" to narrow the search
further. This brings up the complete record of the incident in question:
Dispatchers and supervisors can view a different slice of this crime data at
headquarters via GIS-based BI dashboards that display real time views of incidents,
arrests, 911 calls, and other events. This comprehensive information system
enables the police department to better deploy its force based on insight into
current and expected criminal activity. According to Erlanger Police Chief Marc
Fields, it has proven its ability to protect citizens and reduce costs through
more efficient crime solving techniques.
Organizing the data
As Chief Fields and his colleagues learned, collecting the content for an enterprise
search system is a multi-faceted process that blends several types of information
and integration techniques:
- Extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) technology to gather data from
data warehouses
- Transactional-level conversion to obtain information from ERP systems
- Content-driven document annotation to pull in files from document management
systems
- Integration of thousands of messages (structured and otherwise) that flow
through the organization
The department updates the search index every 15 minutes with crime records
from a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and Records Management System (RMS).
The search technology taps into these records and rapidly scans indexed content
to create Google-style results, transforming them into usable information and
preparing them for searching by end users.
Securing the information
Collecting data is just the beginning. Developers also need to manage processes
that catalog the information, enrich it with information from other systems,
tag it with appropriate metadata and key words, and provide security markers.
Security must be implemented to prevent a search engine from delivering privileged
data to a user who has no authority to access such data. At the same time, this
security must be implemented in such a manner as to not impede the benefits
of search: finding information quickly.
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