Interoperability-Enhanced Knowledge Management in Law Enforcement: An Integrated Data-Driven Forensic Ontological Approach to Crime Scene Analysis

Nowadays, more and more sciences are involved in strengthening the work of law enforcement authorities. Scientific documentation is evidence highly respected by the courts in administering justice. As the involvement of science in solving crimes increases, so does human subjectivism, which often leads to wrong conclusions and, consequently, to bad judgments. From the above arises the need to create a single information system that will be fed with scientific evidence such as fingerprints, genetic material, digital data, forensic photographs, information from the forensic report, etc., and also investigative data such as information from witnesses’ statements, the apology of the accused, etc., from various crime scenes that will be able, through formal reasoning procedure, to conclude possible perpetrators. The present study examines a proposal for developing an information system that can be a basis for creating a forensic ontology—a semantic representation of the crime scene—through descriptive logic in the owl semantic language. The Interoperability-Enhanced information system to be developed could assist law enforcement authorities in solving crimes. At the same time, it would promote closer cooperation between academia, civil society, and state institutions by fostering a culture of engagement for the common good

Semantic Representation of the Intersection of Criminal Law & Civil Tort

The more complex and globalized social structures become, the greater the need for new ways of exchanging information and knowledge. Legal science is a field that needs to be codified to allow the interoperability between people and states, as well as between humans and machines. The objective of this work is to develop an ontology in order to describe two different pillars of codified law (civil and criminal) and be able to depict the interaction between them. To answer the above question, we examine the Greek Criminal Law as depicted in the Greek Penal Code (ΠΚ) and the way its articles can be analyzed. Then we examine Tort as described in the Greek Civil Code (AΚ) and link the two codifications through the concepts of illegality and damage, both being prerequisites of tortious liability. Following that, through the Protégé application, a legal ontology is created in the OWL semantic language, while finally, four articles of the Penal Code are codified in the ontology and a presentation of their relation to the civil tort is required from a reasoning algorithm

A combined synchrotron powder diffraction and vibrational study of the thermal treatment of palygorskite-indigo to produce Maya blue

The heating process (30–200 °C) of a paly- gorskite-indigo mixture has been monitored in situ and simultaneously by synchrotron powder diffraction and Raman spectroscopy. During this process, the dye and the clay interact to form Maya blue (MB), a pigment highly resistant to degradation. It is shown that the formation of a very stable pigment occurs in the 70–130 °C interval; i.e., when palygorskite starts to loose zeolitic water, and is accompanied by a reduction of the crystallographic a parameter, as well as by alterations in the C=C and C=O bonds of indigo. Mid- and near-infrared spectroscopic work and microporosity measurements, employed to study the rehydration process after the complex formation, pro- vide evidence for the inhibition of the rehydration of MB as compared with palygorskite. These results are consistent with the blocking of the palygorskite tunnel entrance by indigo molecules with a possible partial penetration inside the tunnels. The surface silanols of palygorskite are not perturbed by indigo, suggesting that MB is not a surface complex