When it comes to analyzing information to process criminal cases, data selection and quality are two vital success factors. To meet these equirements, police departments need special solutions that make it easier to select and analyze large volumes of case data. In its search for an appropriate solution, rola Security Solutions decided to integrate InfoZoom technology into rsCASE®, the software standard for managing criminal investigation cases in Germany. Today, more than 50,000 police officers across ten different states use the integrated InfoZoom technology to select and verify the quality of case data before further processing it in specific rsCASE® modules.

Using InfoZoom, officers can perform these tasks without any programming or support from IT specialists.

“In Germany, rsCASE® is the standard for processing criminal investigation cases – in part, due to the integrated InfoZoom technology,”

Comment: Dirk Linneman, Director of Product Management and Sales at rola Security Solutions.

By implementing the analysis tool into its software, the vendor added new capabilities for optimizing administrative processes. “Our users need first-class data quality to success­fully solve criminal cases. By analyzing the gaps and errors within the data ­itself, however, they also get a clear indication of how they can avoid these mistakes in the first place during day-to-day investigation processes,” continues Linneman.

Integrating InfoZoom technology into rsCASE® delivered this added value. By analyzing the quality of their data, officers can now understand how they can optimize the administrative processes that rsCASE® supports. By analyzing automobile theft data, for instance, a user might notice that important data fields describing the stolen vehicle are empty. This is reason enough to take a closer look at the data entry process to find possible causes for the missing data and introduce quality improvement measures.

Officers analyze large volumes of data

By integrating InfoZoom technology into rsCASE®, rola Security Solutions has also drastically reduced its own programming requirements for analyses, database queries and selection trees. “Our development team was getting bogged down with a growing number of individual user requirements. We couldn’t allow the strategic development of rsCASE® to suffer as a consequence,” recalled Linneman.

»Right now, I don’t know any comparable technology that is faster than InfoZoom.«

As a result, rola decided to give end users more control over selecting and validating their data, which they could then further process in different rsCASE® modules. The software vendor quickly realized that ­InfoZoom was able to support the data selection and verification requirements of rsCASE® users like no other tool. Another advantage was that the software can flexibly consolidate large data volumes in an instant so that users can quickly see if this data contains any unusual findings.

Promptly after its decision to integrate InfoZoom, the software vendor launched an initial prototype of the new functionality in rsCASE®. Since police departments in Bavaria first started using InfoZoom technology in 2002, additional functionality has been added to the analysis tool. Today, InfoZoom is fully integrated as a Java applet in rsCASE®.

rsCASE® is based on Oracle databases. As part of their daily activities, rsCASE® users access masses of data on different investigation topics. Based on this selection, officers can use the InfoZoom module in rsCASE® to choose specific data to answer ad hoc questions. By visualizing large quantities of data, InfoZoom gives users instant insights on the quality and plausibility of the available information. At the click of a mouse, they can then further process these results in another rsCASE® module, for example, for visualizing correlations, viewing geographical information (GIS), reporting, administering files, tracking DNA, monitoring telephone calls, or storing evidence.

Optimizing data quality and administrative processes

In addition to helping solve cases and fight crime, the integration of InfoZoom with rsCASE® also helps improve data quality and administrative processes, which are necessary to ensure impeccable investigation data. “Right now, I don’t know of any technology other than InfoZoom that can instantly detect missing data, incorrect information or the different constellations of a data entry.”, summarizes Linneman.