Process-driven collaboration support for intra-agency crime analysis

In law enforcement applications, there is a critical need for new tools that can facilitate efficient and effective collaboration. Through a field study, we observe that crime analysis, a critical component of law enforcement operations, is knowledge intensive and often involves collaborative efforts from multiple law enforcement officers within and across agencies. To better facilitate such knowledge intensive collaboration and thereby improve law enforcement agencies' crime-fighting capabilities, we propose a novel methodology based on modeling and implementation techniques from workflow management and information retrieval. This paper presents this process-driven collaboration methodology and its prototype implementation as part of an integrated law enforcement information management environment called COPLINK.