Special 3: Forensic Databases

Chair: Pierre Margot
Co chair: Kees van der Beek

Forensic databases traditionally play an important role in reducing the possible sources of crime related material thereby providing investigative leads to the police and/or evidence to the judiciary. The reduction may lead to a group of sources (e.g. paints, glass, tire treads, shoeprints), one single source (e.g ballistics, DNA, fingerprints). New perspectives are offered with the development of structured memories to detect crime phenomena (phenomenological dimension of forensic science) in forensic intelligence. Datamining may also offer further insights into criminal activities. Contributions with regard to databases in forensic science could cover the following topics (but this is not exclusive and novel approaches will be highly appreciated).

• Database access and safety
• Statistical aspects of forensic databases (database dynamics, performance parameters)
• Developing and maintaining trace and reference databases
• Knowledge management : generating forensic knowledge from data
• Combining information from forensic databases
• International data exchange (practical and legal aspects)
• Prevention of false positive and false negative matches
• Structuring databases
• Phenomenological detection and databases
• Open and closed databases
• Datamining
• Datasharing and privacy