HOLMES2
Encyclopedia
HOLMES 2 is an Information Technology
system that is predominantly used by UK
Police forces for the investigation of major incidents such as serial murders and multi-million pound fraud
s.
The system is a single application
which was developed by Unisys
for the Police Information Technology Organisation
under the Private Finance Initiative
. It provides total compatibility and consistency between all the Police forces of England
, Scotland
, Wales
, and Northern Ireland
, as well as the Royal Military Police
. The name of the system is a backronym
for the fictional private investigator, Sherlock Holmes
.
to improve effectiveness and productivity in crime investigations. Like HOLMES 2, it was an administrative support system which was primarily designed to assist Senior Investigation Officers in their management of the complexity of investigating serious crime. To this end, HOLMES carefully processed the mass of information it was provided with and ensured that no vital clues were overlooked.
But the system had crucial weaknesses, too. It provided very little support to the investigation of the crime per se and had only very limited opportunities to link separate incidents, especially across police force boundaries. What was needed was a solution that allowed an increased amount of information exchange combined with a better use of the information.
concentrates on the Major Incident Room (MIR). This is the administrative centre where further investigation actions are coordinated and all the information from members of public, enquiry officers and other sources is gathered. With the help of input masks, HOLMES 2 is provided with the relevant information and used by the Senior Investigating Officer to direct and control the course of the enquiry. In this respect, the system uses a combination of COTS
(Commercial Off-The-Shelf) components and purpose-built software to provide the most cost-effective system for the Police Service. Furthermore, the improved HOLMES embeds Computer intelligence
for the first time. The Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE), for example, makes it possible to combine the skills and experiences of crime investigators with the acquired knowledge of the system in order to identify new lines of enquiry as follows
The features of HOLMES 2 can be outlined as follows:
Another important use of HOLMES 2 lies in Disaster Management
. The reason for this can be seen in the similarities that exist between the investigation of a major incident and a major disaster. In case of a disaster, HOLMES 2 collaborates with the facilities for disaster management via the Casualty Bureau. The additional functions required for Casualty Bureau operations, like recording Interpol
data and specific action management facilities, are fully integrated into the HOLMES 2. HOLMES 2 also provides the ability to pool resources in order to handle more effectively the initial peak load of missing person calls from the public.
There is also a fully mobile version of HOLMES 2 which can be run on a laptop
for use in courts or while travelling.
Professional or NT 4.0
workstations with UNIX
servers running either Solaris or UnixWare
. The system network communicates by using TCP/IP
network protocols for LAN
and WLAN
communication.
Furthermore, HOLMES 2 uses a 2-tier approach for local database
access and a 3-tier approach for remote database access, whereby remote database access is user-configurable from the front end. A freetext database allows users to ask unstructured questions and to present the results in order of relevance. Apart from that, a dual operation was adopted to increase the speed of the system. While searches themselves were tuned at the SQL
(Structured Query Language) level, additional indexes on the RDBMS
(Relational database management system) tables were deployed.
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
system that is predominantly used by UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Police forces for the investigation of major incidents such as serial murders and multi-million pound fraud
Fraud
In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...
s.
The system is a single application
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
which was developed by Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
for the Police Information Technology Organisation
Police Information Technology Organisation
-History:The UK government Police National Computer project was evolved in the early 1970s, and was launched in 1974 with Stolen Vehicles as its initial database....
under the Private Finance Initiative
Private Finance Initiative
The private finance initiative is a way of creating "public–private partnerships" by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital...
. It provides total compatibility and consistency between all the Police forces of England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, and Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
, as well as the Royal Military Police
Royal Military Police
The Royal Military Police is the corps of the British Army responsible for the policing of service personnel, and for providing a military police presence both in the UK, and whilst service personnel are deployed overseas on operations and exercises.Members of the RMP are generally known as...
. The name of the system is a backronym
Backronym
A backronym or bacronym is a phrase constructed purposely, such that an acronym can be formed to a specific desired word. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology....
for the fictional private investigator, Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
.
HOLMES
HOLMES 2 is an improvement of the original HOLMES system that was introduced in 1986. HOLMES enabled law enforcement agenciesLaw enforcement agency
In North American English, a law enforcement agency is a government agency responsible for the enforcement of the laws.Outside North America, such organizations are called police services. In North America, some of these services are called police while others have other names In North American...
to improve effectiveness and productivity in crime investigations. Like HOLMES 2, it was an administrative support system which was primarily designed to assist Senior Investigation Officers in their management of the complexity of investigating serious crime. To this end, HOLMES carefully processed the mass of information it was provided with and ensured that no vital clues were overlooked.
But the system had crucial weaknesses, too. It provided very little support to the investigation of the crime per se and had only very limited opportunities to link separate incidents, especially across police force boundaries. What was needed was a solution that allowed an increased amount of information exchange combined with a better use of the information.
Replacement
Against this background, the British Police Service started a plan to replace the existing system with a new, improved version in 1994. The new version, HOLMES 2, overcame the known weaknesses of HOLMES. Additionally, it is more flexible for future changes and provides a speedier and more efficient access to information. The system was finally released to the first forces in 2000, while the last forces became operational in early 2004.Applications
As mentioned above, HOLMES 2’s most important function is the one as a crime investigation tool. For this purpose, it is based on an organised and methodical approach, whose structureStructure
Structure is a fundamental, tangible or intangible notion referring to the recognition, observation, nature, and permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. This notion may itself be an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society...
concentrates on the Major Incident Room (MIR). This is the administrative centre where further investigation actions are coordinated and all the information from members of public, enquiry officers and other sources is gathered. With the help of input masks, HOLMES 2 is provided with the relevant information and used by the Senior Investigating Officer to direct and control the course of the enquiry. In this respect, the system uses a combination of COTS
Commercial off-the-shelf
In the United States, Commercially available Off-The-Shelf is a Federal Acquisition Regulation term defining a nondevelopmental item of supply that is both commercial and sold in substantial quantities in the commercial marketplace, and that can be procured or utilized under government contract...
(Commercial Off-The-Shelf) components and purpose-built software to provide the most cost-effective system for the Police Service. Furthermore, the improved HOLMES embeds Computer intelligence
Computational intelligence
Computational intelligence is a set of Nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex problems of the real world applications to which traditional methodologies and approaches are ineffective or infeasible. It primarily includes Fuzzy logic systems, Neural Networks...
for the first time. The Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE), for example, makes it possible to combine the skills and experiences of crime investigators with the acquired knowledge of the system in order to identify new lines of enquiry as follows
The features of HOLMES 2 can be outlined as follows:
- Document Management enables the flow of all documents to be monitored and controlled throughout the investigation. Senior investigating officers can view the state of each document and quickly identify bottlenecks in the process.
- Workflow Management allows law enforcement organisations to tailor HOLMES 2 to suit their individual work practices.
- Graphical Indexing provides the facility to visualise the indexing by the automatic generation of a link chart. The user can also index directly from a marked up copy of the document, thus eliminating the need for the user to re-key the data.
- Record Management enables all structured data to be quickly retrieved for research and analysis. Structured data is searched before creation to reduce the risk of duplication. Powerful search facilities include exact matching, truncated matching, synonym matching and wild card searches.
- Task Management facilities allow the user to allocate actions to investigating officers and monitor the progress. Actions can be prioritised and the priority level of an action can be modified at any time. HOLMES 2 provides the facility to view a graphical representation of outstanding actions and officer workload to assist in the assessment of work outstanding, staffing levels and bottlenecks in the process.
- Exhibit Management provides a facility to manage and track the movement of all crime-related property throughout the investigation. A full movement history is maintained for each exhibit. Whenever an exhibit is taken from its storage place, the details of the removal are recorded. This maintains an audit trail that can be presented to anyone questioning the integrity of the exhibit.
- Research and Analysis provides the possibility to produce sequence of events charts and association (link) charts, and compare databases to identify potential links with similar investigations.
- Disclosure Management manages the disclosure of unused material in an investigation. It allows the Disclosure Officer to perform primary and secondary disclosure to assess the material and produce the relevant schedules for the Crown Prosecution ServiceCrown Prosecution ServiceThe Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
. - Court Preparation facilities allow all material required for court, including documents and exhibits, to be prepared efficiently and professionally. The graphical presentation allows the system to be used in court to show how complex information flows are linked.
Another important use of HOLMES 2 lies in Disaster Management
Emergency management
Emergency management is the generic name of an interdisciplinary field dealing with the strategic organizational management processes used to protect critical assets of an organization from hazard risks that can cause events like disasters or catastrophes and to ensure the continuance of the...
. The reason for this can be seen in the similarities that exist between the investigation of a major incident and a major disaster. In case of a disaster, HOLMES 2 collaborates with the facilities for disaster management via the Casualty Bureau. The additional functions required for Casualty Bureau operations, like recording Interpol
Interpol
Interpol, whose full name is the International Criminal Police Organization – INTERPOL, is an organization facilitating international police cooperation...
data and specific action management facilities, are fully integrated into the HOLMES 2. HOLMES 2 also provides the ability to pool resources in order to handle more effectively the initial peak load of missing person calls from the public.
There is also a fully mobile version of HOLMES 2 which can be run on a laptop
Laptop
A laptop, also called a notebook, is a personal computer for mobile use. A laptop integrates most of the typical components of a desktop computer, including a display, a keyboard, a pointing device and speakers into a single unit...
for use in courts or while travelling.
Technical Details
The Client/Server architecture of HOLMES 2 is based on Microsoft Windows 2000Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a line of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, business desktops, laptops, and servers. Windows 2000 was released to manufacturing on 15 December 1999 and launched to retail on 17 February 2000. It is the successor to Windows NT 4.0, and is the...
Professional or NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It was the next release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996...
workstations with UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
servers running either Solaris or UnixWare
UnixWare
UnixWare is a Unix operating system maintained by The SCO Group . UnixWare is typically deployed as a server rather than desktop. Binary distributions of UnixWare are available for x86 architecture computers. It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System...
. The system network communicates by using TCP/IP
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
network protocols for LAN
Local area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
and WLAN
Wireless LAN
A wireless local area network links two or more devices using some wireless distribution method , and usually providing a connection through an access point to the wider internet. This gives users the mobility to move around within a local coverage area and still be connected to the network...
communication.
Furthermore, HOLMES 2 uses a 2-tier approach for local database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
access and a 3-tier approach for remote database access, whereby remote database access is user-configurable from the front end. A freetext database allows users to ask unstructured questions and to present the results in order of relevance. Apart from that, a dual operation was adopted to increase the speed of the system. While searches themselves were tuned at the SQL
SQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
(Structured Query Language) level, additional indexes on the RDBMS
Relational database management system
A relational database management system is a database management system that is based on the relational model as introduced by E. F. Codd. Most popular databases currently in use are based on the relational database model....
(Relational database management system) tables were deployed.
See also
- Home OfficeHome OfficeThe Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
- Geographic information systemGeographic Information SystemA geographic information system, geographical information science, or geospatial information studies is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data...
- Crime mappingCrime mappingCrime mapping is used by analysts in law enforcement agencies to map, visualize, and analyze crime incident patterns. It is a key component of crime analysis and the CompStat policing strategy...
- Artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...