Solicitation: Geospatial Technology

February 3, 2010 - The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is pleased to announce that it is seeking applications for funding to conduct research, development, testing, and evaluation supporting the advancement of geospatial technologies to aid criminal justice agencies in their missions. This program furthers the Department’s mission by sponsoring research to provide objective, independent, evidence-based knowledge and tools to meet the challenges of crime and justice, particularly at the State and local levels.

1) Mobile Mapping and Geographic Data Capture Tools: There is a need for mapping tools compatible with the operating environments of mobile and handheld computing devices to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of law enforcement and other criminal justice practitioners in the field. Many mobile and nonmobile mapping tools are also under-utilized due to the lack of tools allowing for automatic capture of geographic data while in the field. Tools for fast, easy, and accurate capture of geographic data are needed to maximize the abilities of mobile and handheld devices.

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2) 3-Dimensional Modeling and Geocoding: There is a need for tools and technologies that can provide three-dimensional modeling and geocoding functionality for analytical or operational purposes. Law enforcement and other criminal justice practitioners require such tools for emergency planning and response in an analytical context.

3) Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis Visualization Tools: The keys to identifying patterns in the enormous amounts of data being collected lie in geographic visualization tools. It has become increasingly difficult to exploit data using existing analysis and visualization tools as today’s databases are becoming larger and more detailed and encompass time frames that span many years. Proposed tools should enable analysts to geographically explore and visualize data in ways that provide multiple and dynamic views for uncovering relationships that would have not otherwise been discovered. These exploratory spatial data analysis tools should assist analysts by helping them to better visualize crime and criminal justice data in ways that are uncommon, allow hypotheses to be formed, identify patterns that would not have otherwise been found, or extend current capabilities of the tools they already use.

4) Social Network Analysis: Many social network analysis tools exist, but lack the ability to conduct spatial analysis of these social relationships using geographic data. There is a need for tools and technologies that enable the spatial analysis of the geographic linkages of relationships between people, groups, and organizations that may be of interest to law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies, such as gang relationships or organized drug markets. The ability to combine the social and spatial relationships of people will provide new insights into the abatement of crime as well as crime-related issues of disorder.

5) Geographic Crime Series Linkage Analysis: The analysis of crime data for a connected series is an important first step in geographic profiling. Many analysts sift through hundreds of cases using their expert judgment to determine whether a set of crimes are related. Linkage analysis tools that help identify and extract previously unknown spatial relationships from data sets common to State and local law enforcement agencies can aid analysts in this effort. The resulting tools will identify sets of spatially grouped crimes that are statistically linked and can be exported out for further analysis. Furthermore, these linkage analysis tools will enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the analysis performed by crime analysts.

6) Operationalizing of Crime Theories into Tools: Technologies have advanced to the point that many theories of crime (e.g., routine activities, crime pattern, deviant places, etc.) can be tested, whether in a laboratory, experimental, or secondary data analysis setting. As such, there is a need to develop tools that have a high operational value based off of these known criminological theories. Practitioners could benefit greatly from being able to automatically utilize aspects of these theories directly in an analytical environment through tools. These tools should allow law enforcement or other criminal justice agencies the opportunity to use those theories directly with the data they work with at their agency. Overall, these tools should fully incorporate and integrate crime theory in an effort to improve crime analysis and crime prevention practices.

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http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/sl000911.pdf