Crime and Timelines
January 27, 2010
I had a conversation yesterday (January 25, 2010) with a colleague. The question was the ability of online systems to date and time stamp events. If you are familiar with the i2.co.uk technology, you know that one of its features is the ability to generate a timeline. Events can be plotted by hours, days, or other intervals. This type of information display is quite useful in certain types of research.
The I2 company is a specialized outfit and it is not well known outside of a narrow market sector. The company, in my opinion, was a pioneer in the machine processing of data and generating useful time displays. But the usefulness of time lines remains an area of interest to specialists.
Google has done an excellent job with its Google News Timeline. If you have not explored that service, you can access it at http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/. I don’t want to veer into a discussion of Google’s significant work in time and historical systems and methods.
Source: http://www.fetch.com/products/footprint/fetchcheck/howitworks/
I do want to highlight a company I mentioned in my conversation referenced above: Fetch Technologies. In 2008, I saw a demonstration of the company’s FootPrint technology. You can get some basic information about the FootPrint system from the Fetch Technologies Web site. I thought the system was forward looking in 2008 and I have the same opinion today.
In a nutshell:
Fetch FootPrint’s DaaS gives background screening/pre employment professionals accurate real time criminal history data culled from hundreds of online sources without having to purchase dedicated software, pay upfront license agreements or make internal IT integration investments. “We leveraged our AI tools to develop our DaaS delivery model to eliminate the expense of court runners and the time consuming process of looking up online records manually.
The system processes information from hundreds of online information sources. The focus is on real time updates, not the content that may be weeks, months, or years old; for example, certain publicly accessible repositories of registration information not updated by certain information providers.
You can get more information from the company about some of its approaches by contacting the company directly.
As I said to my colleague, this is worth a look. Fetch has a number of sophisticated real-time information services. Several of these push the envelope in real time information acquisition and analysis. Before embracing a “real time” solution from a content management vendor or content processing vendor jumping into real time because it is trendy, check out the Fetch approach.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2010
A freebie. I don’t think I have ever been to El Segundo for fun or money. I will report this to the governor of California.
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