News
PTL to improve Virginia IBR System for State Police
2006-11-30
The Virginia State Police has sponsored the PTL to develop training materials and documentation for the Virginia Incident Based Reporting System. This work will make submitting IBR records to the state easier and more accurate.
Fighting Crime Through Systems Engineering
2006-10-26
Research News publishes article on WebCAT. article link
PTL wins grant for continued work on WebCAT
2006-08-01
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services awarded the PTL a new grant to continue work on the Web-based Crime Analysis toolkit. This grant will fund the expansion of the WebCAT tool. This expansion will include the addition five new data types and a wide range of new analysis tools. This grant will also fund the development of advanced features such as spatial crime prediction, change detection, and criminal incident association.
DaPro Systems Licenses PTL's Web-based Crime Analysis Toolkit
2006-07-01
In July of 2006, DaPro Systems licensed WebCAT, the Web-based Crime Analysis Toolkit, from the Department of Systems and Information Engineering. WebCAT provides crime analysts and police officers easy access to historical crime data and a suite of tools to analyze these data. In addition to providing users access to the data from their own jurisdiction, WebCAT enables sharing of data between jurisdictions. This is an important step forward for policing in the state of Virginia.
WebCAT has been developed by fourth year Systems and Information Engineering Students through the department's Capstone Program. In this program, students work on real projects commissioned by companies and government agencies to apply their skills as Systems Engineers. The WebCAT program has been funded since 2001 by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. Within four months of licensing the software, DaPro Systems has sold the software to several jurisdictions throughout the state and many other localities have expressed interest in purchasing the system.
Currently, students are working to increase WebCAT's capabilities by adding new types of data to the system and implementing new analysis tools for analysts. Over the next two years, WebCAT will be expanded to analyze new data (including calls for service, warrants, arrests, and people), predict the location of future crimes, automatically detect changes in crime patterns, and automatically link related crimes. By packaging these tools in WebCAT, the department is transitioning over seven years of research by more than a dozen researchers to publicly available tools. These tools will provide police the information they need to reduce crime across the state.