Fabrizio Turchi
Fabrizio TURCHI is the technological director at Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IGSG). His research activities are the applications of IT to legal domain, legal standard and legal drafting, and use of the XML technologies to devise legal documents models. He has been designing and developing Web applications, formal parsers to identify parts and structures that exist inside textual documents and natural language processing techniques applied to legal documents for knowledge
extraction, such as automated text classification and anonymity processes based on Named Entity Recognition (NER). He has been involved in many European projects:
- Evidence (European Informatics Data Exchange Framework for Courts and Evidence - March 2014/ August 2016), as leader of the WP4 (Standard Issues);
- Evidence2e-Codex (Linking Evidence into e-CODEX for EIO and MLA procedures in Europe - February 2018 /January 2020), as leader of the WP3 (Matching Evidence into e-CODEX)
- EXEC-II (Electronic eXchange of e-Evidences with e-CODEX - October 2020/September 2022), as leader of the WP6 (Piloting of the exchange of digital evidence across Member States by using the Evidence Exchange Standard Package Application)
- INSPECTr (Intelligence Network & Secure Platform for Evidence Correlation and Transfer (INSPECTr, as leader of the WP2 (Provide a Reference Framework for the Standardisation of Evidence Representation & Exchange (SERE) to be implemented in the INSPECTr platform)
Sessions
In a recent EU publication, a report commissioned by the European Union related to the Cross-border Digital Criminal Justice environment, a set of specific business needs have been identified. Some of the most relevant ones have been:
The interoperability across different systems needs to be ensured.
The stakeholders need to easily manage the data and ensure its quality, allowing them to properly make use of it (e.g. use the data as evidence in a given case).
The stakeholders investigating a given case should be able to identify links between cross-border cases. Therefore, solutions are needed to allow the stakeholder to search and find relevant information they need for the case they are handling.
The study presents a set of solutions to address the highlighted needs, including:
- Judicial Cases Cross-Check (Evidence standard representation is suitable)
A Judicial Cases Cross-Check system should provide a tool being able to search for case-related information and identify links among cases that are being investigated in other Member States or by JHA agencies and EU bodies.
To facilitate the development of the above solution, a standard representation of the metadata and data of the Evidence should be adopted. In particular the ontology UCO/CASE, dedicated to the digital forensic domain, seems the most promising one to this aim. UCO/CASE, that stands for Unified Cyber Ontology / Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression, provides a structured specification for representing information that are analysed and exchanged during investigations involving digital evidence. To perform digital investigations effectively, there is a pressing need to harmonise how information relevant to cyber-investigations is represented and exchanged. CASE enables the merge of information from different data sources and forensic tool outputs to allow more comprehensive and cohesive analysis. All these metadata represented in a standard format, could be provided to any potential stakeholder using a decentralised repository of metadata along with a suitable level of confidentiality and integrity.
The INSPECTr project (inspectr-project.eu) opted for the open-source UCO/CASE ontology to serve as a standard for interchange, interoperability, and analysis of investigative information.