Government Computer News
FBI unveils N-DEx rollout
Nationwide network to link law enforcement agencies
The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Service today unveiled the long-planned first increment of the National Data Exchange information sharing web.
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"N-DEx will enable all law enforcement agencies to share incident reports, correlate crime data and collaborate on criminal justice investigations on a national basis," according to a Raytheon press announcement cleared by the bureau.
The bureau's Criminal Justice Information Division, based in Clarksburg, W.Va., sponsored the system. The network is intended to enable law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local level to collaborate on their investigative work by sharing information held in one another's data systems.
The FBI and prime contractor Raytheon have relied on advice from the fledgling system's prospective users in law enforcement agencies nationwide to set the priorities of the N-DEx capabilities that will be progressively rolled out over the next three years.
Raytheon said in its announcement that N-DEx relies on a service-oriented architecture designed eventually to support 200,000 investigators in up to 18,000 local, state, tribal and federal enforcement agencies. "The investigators will use N-DEx to gather and share incident and investigative information across disparate systems and jurisdiction boundaries," Raytheon said.
In such systems, important investigative data items such as information about crimes, locations, drugs, weapons, individuals, money in various forms and the like can be linked and correlated. Law enforcement investigators use tools such as the widespread Analysts Notebook application, which allows them to create conceptual, visual networks that reflect links among such data objects.
For example, one such visual image that relies on data drawn from several systems shows the links among Osama bin Laden and his various fellow terrorists, their sources of funds and travel documents, their communications links and weapons sources, as well as their known targets and hideouts. The system takes into account various ways the underlying systems might describe a given crime or weapon, for example, to clarify and combine known information about the data element.
Today's announcement described that function this way: "The first increment gives 50,000 users the ability to capture case data and conduct 'entity resolution' on incidents and arrest data. Entity resolution identifies possible candidates for known aliases, based on information (name, address, phone number, etc.) in multiple records. The system then correlates the data, resulting in the identification of candidates for consideration. The information is then presented to the user for further analysis."
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