Online Police Station, A State-of-Art Italian Semantic Technology against Cybercrime

This paper describes a content enabling system that provides deep semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and general public. It provides with a language independent search and dynamic classification features for a broad range of data collected from several sources in a number of culturally diverse languages. This system is part of the Online Police Station, launched by the Italian Minister of the Interior in 2006. The Online Police Station uses a virtual reality interface to provide general information and online assistance. Citizens can download forms, make complaints, receive advice and/or report events of an illegal nature. Police specialists can monitor criminal trends to ensure that responses are appropriately focused, and that scarce resources are more effectively employed against criminality. Online Police Station was voted as the Most inspiring good practice for creative solutions to common challenges, at the European eGovernment Awards 2007.