Information gathered through operational policing can be input as a 'report'. Reports comply with the 5x5x5 model and can be linked to other entities such as Nominals, People, Vehicles, and Addresses.

The reports are broken down into types; Information, Stop-checks, Sightings etc.

Create Information Report

In addition, UNIFI takes the data input through the application modules described here and supplements the linking of entities with links derived from the data input. A useful example is with Custody. A custody officer is able to record a vehicle in the booking in process, and to state the relationship; driver, owner, passenger etc. This is useful intelligence and UNIFI creates the required links (detainee to vehicle) in the context of the custody record without the Custody Officer having to doing anything other than enter the details in the booking in screens.

As an added intelligence tool, UNIFI has an Integrated Intelligence Charting module which produces a graphical network diagram, showing links between People, Objects, Locations and Events, allowing visualization of links between data and supporting drill down and data exploration via a graphical interface.

Intelligence Charting and Link Analysis

Relational Intelligence

Within the Intelligence module where data is linked or associated to other data and subsequently used for intelligence purposes, it is termed relational intelligence. For example over time a nominal may be related to a vehicle, several locations, other people (victims, witnesses, offenders), custody records, sightings, crimes etc… UNIFI provides the capability to build this relational intelligence implicitly through the day-to-day use of the system. This is achieved through the reuse of key data entities within the system, such as Nominals and Vehicles, by ensuring users search and use existing records rather than creating new ones. Duplicate records are therefore kept to a minimum and relational intelligence is built every day. These mechanisms have been used with great success in previous versions of the product, providing linked data and high quality intelligence data stores with a duplication rate of less than 5%.

Relational Intelligence supports the recommendations of the Bichard Enquiry in a way that does not overload the force as the system does most of the intelligence linking automatically. This results in intelligence that is not only recorded, but that is recorded in a consistent manner across the entire force. This helps to ensure best practice is followed and important intelligence data is not lost.

Contextual Data

The key data entities within the system, for example Nominals and Organisations are all stored in the context of events and links to other entities. This enables the relational intelligence to be created over time. Building upon this relational intelligence is Contextual Data.

Contextual Data is created by the system every time a Nominal or Organisation is reused within the system. For example, if a Nominal comes into contact with the Police Force on two separate occasions, with two different addresses, this fact will be preserved. In essence a history of each data entity is recorded. This ‘history’ is recorded in the context of each of the events that caused the data to be recorded. UNIFI retrieves the correct snapshot of the nominal at the time of each context. This type of information is vital for intelligence and in court cases. Links can be viewed from any part in the chain and a complete history of each data entity can also be retrieved. This diagram shows an example of maintaining Contextual Data.

When data is linked, the links contain contextual information that enables the Analysts to view historical information about an entity. For example if a nominal has three custody images taken in three consecutive years with different hair colour in each, the system enables the Analyst to easily identify this, by presenting all three images to the Analyst, providing all the descriptive data captured at that particular moment in time and can therefore be viewed in relation to an investigation.

Maintaining Contextual Data