About Developing a Cross-Check System for Judicial Case Searching and Correlation

In a recent EU publication, a report commissioned by the European Union related to the Cross-border Digitai Criminal Justice environment, a set of specifìc business needs have been identifìed. Some of the most relevant ones have been: i) the interoperability across different systems needs to be ensured, ii) the stakeholders need to easily manage the data and ensure its quality, allowing them to properly make use of it (e.g. use the data as evi­dence in a given case) and iii) the stakeholders investigating a given case should be able to identify links between cross-border cases. Therefore, solutions are needed to allow the stakeholder to search and fìnd relevant informa­tion they need for the case they are handling. The article presents a set of solutions to address the highlighted needs, including a 'Judicial Cases Cross-Check System'. Such a system should provide a tool being able to search for case-related information and identify links among cases that are being investigateci in other EU Member States or by Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) agencies and EU bodies. To facilitate the development of the above solution, a standard representation of the metadata and data of the evidence should be adopted. In particular the Uni­fìed Cyber Ontology (UCO) and Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE), dedicateci to the digitai forensic domain, seem the most promising one to this aim. Moreover it provides a structured specifìcation for representing information that are analysed and exchanged during investigations involving digitai evidence.