Thursday, October 9. 2008

Connecting the Dots: Geographic Tracking of Crime in Unusual Ways

I had the opportunity to attend MetaCarta’s Public Sector User Group meeting today. Directions has covered MetaCarta’s technology for several years and in order to adequately extract at least one nugget of new information about the company’s technology, an example is the best way to illustrate it.

One of the key applications realized by public safety organizations is the ability to link bits of news, police reports in this example, to geographic trends and deduce anticipated results. The North Texas Fusion Centers (NTFC) distills this kind of information for emergency management and natural disasters in addition to crime analysis. And so, at various times, it becomes necessary to temporarily close the border with Mexico for 24 hours, according to Bob Warren of MetaCarta. Crime and incident reports are logged during and after the closure. When the border is opened again, authorities find there is a drop in crime, followed by an increase in crime. These text-based reports are assimilated using MetaCarta's Georeferencing engine whereby the location of each report is extracted and displayed on a map. The result is the recognition of a ripple effect of crime across the state. Crime is noted to occur along the interstate corridors leading to Dallas from the border that reach the city within about three days. The analysis: Cross border weapons movement seems to converge on Dallas and might not have been detected without visualizing this movement of crime along these geographic corridors. So, by geotagging reports, police are able to see how crime travels.

Also, just last week we discussed how MetaCarta’s technology will be unbundled and licensed differently than in the past with the objective of creating a larger audience for their products. Likewise, we held a webinar in the summer that more fully examines their technology.

[Disclosure: MetaCarta paid for travel and expenses to attend their meeting.]

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