WebCAT: Enhancement through Analysis of Additional Data

Since the year 2000, the University of Virginia Systems and Information Engineering Department has been working with the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (VDCJS) on WebCAT, the Web-Based Crime Analysis Toolkit. WebCAT provides users with crime analysis tools ranging from data query options to graphs and reports generation. Previously, WebCAT allowed users to analyze incident occurrences, such as robberies or kidnappings. The authors have expanded the analysis tools of WebCAT to include arrests, calls for service, offenses, people, and warrants data types. The addition of these data types provides users with analysis capabilities beyond the previous version of WebCAT. For each additional data type, the authors adapted previous WebCAT tools, and created new took specific to each data type. User testing has shown that these additions either drastically reduced the time required to conduct common analysis tasks, or provided the user with analysis options that they did not have before.