ePOOLICE

ePOOLICE was a €5.3m project focused on designing and developing a system that could support the early identification of organised crime threats through an environmental scanning approach. The system exploited several input data sources, including social media, news and hyperlocal sites, open data and statistics to identify and corroborate weak indicators of organised crime. In addition, the project utilised natural language processing, entity/concept extraction, classification, sentiment analysis, text visualisation and semantic filtering combined with a knowledge repository to deliver a situational awareness dashboard of current organised crime threats in Europe.

The project benefited from input from key end-user partners such as West Yorkshire Police, Guardia Civil, Europol and the United National Interregional Crime and Justice Research Unit (UNICRI). The core use cases of ePOOLICE focused on the trafficking of human beings, drug trafficking into and across Europe and metal theft, specifically focused on copper. CENTRIC led the development of taxonomies and weak indicators for each use case and the dashboard's implementation. The work in ePOOLICE laid the foundation for CENTRIC's later work in open source intelligence (OSINT).