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HOLMES 2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) is an information technology system that is predominantly used by UK police forces for the investigation of major incidents such as serial murders and high value
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s. The system is a single
application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...
which was developed by Unisys and McDonnell Douglas Information Systems (in competition, not co-operation) for the Police Information Technology Organisation under a
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. 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 reference to the fictional
Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Ho ...
private detective character
Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes () is a fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a " consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and ...
.


History of development


HOLMES

HOLMES was introduced in 1985 and enabled law enforcement agencies to improve effectiveness and productivity in crime investigations. Like the later HOLMES 2, it was an administrative support system that 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. HOLMES was also used to support the Police UK Casualty Bureau providing facilities to record reported missing persons, casualties, survivors and evacuees. The application provides matching facilities to aid the reconciliation of missing persons with those involved in the incident. 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 better use of the information. In the summer of 1987 HOLMES was used in conjunction with a West Midlands Police undercover operation known as Operation GROWTH as an aid for undercover police officers who had infiltrated a notorious gang of football hooligans known as The Bridge Boys who followed Wolverhampton Wanderers. Previous trials of football hooligans had collapsed due to the way undercover police gathered evidence while on the job. Any evidence gathered during GROWTH was collated straight to HOLMES which in turn secured successful convictions in December 1988.


Replacement

Against this background, the British police forces 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
structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...
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 the 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
commercial off-the-shelf Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of ...
(COTS) 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. Another important use of HOLMES 2 lies in
disaster management Emergency management or disaster management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Emergency management, despite its name, does not actuall ...
. 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 Casualty may refer to: *Casualty (person), a person who is killed or rendered unfit for service in a war or natural disaster **Civilian casualty, a non-combatant killed or injured in warfare * The emergency department of a hospital, also known as ...
. 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
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for use in courts or while travelling.


Technical details

The client/server architecture of HOLMES 2 is based on
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Professional or
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workstations with UNIX servers running either
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or UnixWare. The system network communicates by using TCP/IP network protocols for
LAN Lan or LAN may also refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in sp ...
and WLAN communication. Furthermore, HOLMES 2 uses a two-tier approach for local database access and a three-tier approach for remote database access, whereby remote database access is user-configurable from the front end. A free-text 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 A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relation ...
(relational database management system) tables were deployed.For further information about the technical details of the system see http://www.holmes2.com/holmes2/whatish2/techdetail/


See also

* Home Office *
Geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...
*
Crime mapping Crime 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. Mapping crime, using Geographic Information Systems ...
* Artificial intelligence


References


External links


HOLMES 2 WebsiteUnisys WebsiteInternational High Technology Crime Investigation AssociationLegal TechnologyJournal ''Artificial Intelligence and Law''
Government databases in the United Kingdom Law enforcement in the United Kingdom Home Office (United Kingdom) {{Unisys