IBM leverages Big Data analytics in new solutions for law enforcement, emergency management

Other databases also provide access to criminal records, but COPLINK is unique in helping law-enforcement officials determine its relevance by noting connections between information found in disparate databases, Russo said.

“It is more than just sharable documents; what we are doing on top of that is correlate the data across various entities to understand relationships across various entities,” he said. “So, if there was drug activity that was occurring, very often the kingpins behind that are two, three or four levels removed from street crime that may be happening.

“What this allows us to do is start to take information that we have and be able to look at the relationships across these entities and look two or three levels removed to make a determination on who may be behind certain malicious or criminal activity that is occurring.”

And this capability is not limited simply to personnel at headquarters or other information center. IBM also announced the ability for officers on the street to make similar connections while in the field, thanks largely to a user-friendly interface for making queries, Russo said.

“There are very advanced analytics in the back end, but one of the core concepts or paradigms is to make those algorithms fairly simplistic from a user-interface standpoint,” Russo said. “So, I can take advantage of the power that happening in the backend but allow officers who are investigating crimes to be able to have access to this information from various endpoint devices.”

This cloud-based analytics solution leverages IBM’s longtime efforts to help enterprises better manage data in a manner that lets them operate more efficiently, Russo said.

“Watson is a separate product set, but some of the things that it does under the covers, in terms of understanding the context and so forth, are part of this,” he said. “There will be further integration in these solutions as we go forward—the ability to analyze literally hundreds of millions of entities and be able to understand the correlation between them—and some of that base capability has come from what was the Watson team.”