IDES project: A new effective tool for safety and security in the environment

Abstract

In the region of Campania in south-west Italy there is growing evidence, including a World Health Organization (WHO) study of the region, that the accumulation of waste, illegal and legal, urban and industrial, has contaminated soil, water, and the air with a range of toxic pollutants including dioxins. An effective environmental monitoring system represents an important tool for an early detection of the environmental violations. The IDES Project is a Geo-environmental Intelligence System developed by the CIRA with the contribution of universities and other government bodies and it aims at implementing an advanced software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The IDES main modules are: Imagery Analysis Module to monitor land-use and anthropogenic changes; Environmental GIS Module to fuse geographical and administrative information; Epidemiological domain Module; Semantic Search Module to discover information in public sources like: Blog, Social Network, Forum, Newspapers; This paper focuses on Semantic Search Module and aims to provide the greatest support to the extraction of possible environmental crimes collecting and analyzing documents from online public sources. Unlikely people denounce criminal activity to the authorities. On the other hand many people through blogs, forums and social networks every day expose the status of land degradation. In addition, journalists often, have given the interest of the public, documenting the critical environmental issues. All this unstructured information are often lost due to the difficulty to collect and analyse. The IDES Semantic Search Module is an innovative solution for aggregating of the common uneasiness and thoughts of the people able to transform and objectify the public opinion in human sensors for safety environmental monitoring. In this paper we introduce methods and technologies used in some case studies and, finally, we report some representatives results, highlighting innovative aspects of this applied research. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.