Functionality

Currently UNIFI Data Services provides scalable, resilient web services, with a clustered deployment providing load balancing and fault tolerance. It supports message persistence and reliable delivery. It provides a common point for interface support and management.

In addition to the currently available architecture, web services in the current release include Person and Crime searching, create and update of Crimes, and constrained value lookup via Get CVs.

Future UDS potential

Further searching, create/update and publish web services will expand the scope of the UDS capability. These additional web services will further support reuse of UNIFI functionality, and move towards positioning UNIFI to be used as an Operational Data Store, at the centre of a force wide SOA.

An example is the integration of the Person records of a third party application with UNIFI; during the creation of a Person the third party application would first call the existing ‘Search for Person’ service (to reduce re-keying and to avoid creating duplicates). Then it would call ‘Create and Update Person’ service, which would either create a new Person record in UNIFI or update an existing one, using UNIFI as the single person repository rather than allowing a separate siloed application to maintain an isolated repository.

Delivery of published web services would work as part of a ‘Publish and Subscribe’ model over a force enterprise service bus, with interested parties subscribing to data feeds.

UNIFI Data Services In Action

For one major Scotish Force two interfaces have been provided to support their local requirements;

The E-Crime interface allows crime records to be created (returning a Crime Reference number) from data supplied to the interface in XML. The force currently uses this from an Intranet application and since going live have created in excess of 4000 crimes through this interface. The force intends to use this interface from their electronic Officers Notebook (PDA).

The Scottish National C&C product interface allows Crime and Vehicle Accident users to retrieve incident details on which to base the Crime or Vehicle Accident record. The interface architecture is shown below and is a working illustration of UNIFI’s integration capability.

C&C Interface Architecture