Webcat: the design and implementation of the Web-based crime analysis toolkit

Last year, a team in the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia developed a Web-based crime analysis toolkit (WebCAT). This Web-based system allows for information sharing and cross-jurisdictional analysis between the various law enforcement agencies throughout Virginia. However, this system was not deployed. This year´s capstone team has improved Web-CAT´s functionality, robustness, and quality of analysis to enable deployment. This work has been done in the context of the whole systems lifecycle: (1) analysis; (2) design; (3) integration; (4) testing; and (5) evaluation. The capstone team has added a number of components to improve data sharing and crime analysis. These new components to WebCAT, among others, have improved the capabilities of crime analysts in terms of (1) quality of analysis; (2) increased speed of performing an analysis; (3) minimal cost necessary to design, implement, use, and maintain the application