A Global Criminal and Terrorist Tracking Framework Using Semantic Grid Technologies

Abstract

With the recent outbreak of terrorist attacks, there is a need for better collaborative actions against tracking terrorists and criminals worldwide. Besides political, administrative, and privacy concerns, disparate terrorist and criminal information and supporting resources make it particularly difficult for monitoring and tracking terrorist and criminal activities. Existing software, hardware, and network infrastructures are still not scalable and efficient enough for a centralized global criminal and terrorist tracking (GCTTF) system. Motivated by the emerging technologies of multi-agent information systems (MAIS) that can effectively assist mobile law enforcement personnel together with Semantic Web and Grid Computing technologies that can effectively organize a large amount of information and service resources, we propose that a ubiquitous criminal and terrorist tracking system be built upon these technologies. In this paper, we formulate and pro-pose a scalable, flexible, and intelligent MAIS infrastructure for a proactive GCTTF. Clients can be built into mobile devices of law enforcement personal and stationary checkpoints while backend systems can scale up to a grid for thousands of systems. We also outline how agents can make use of ontology from the Semantic Grid computing environment to better track criminal and terrorist activities.