Knowledge-Driven Decision-Making at the Crime Scene

Decisions made during forensic investigations are commonly based on personal knowledge, experiences and assumptions. However, forensic professionals generally do not receive feedback on the outcomes of their decisions, resulting in a deficient learning system. An imperfect individual knowledge base can lead to suboptimal decisions without professionals in the criminal justice chain being aware of it. In practice, this has led to considerable variation and lack of well-founded knowledge in the first phases of the forensic investigation process.

The desired situation is that forensic professionals can make decisions based on substantiated knowledge, with transparency about the choices made, so that these decisions can be reflected upon by themselves and other actors in the criminal justice process.

The aim of the project is to develop an interactive decision support tool that can assist complex decision-making within the forensic domain. This support tool can enable crime scene investigators to access and utilize data on historic cases, supplemented with results from scientific research. This knowledge can help address questions related to the likelihood of obtaining a DNA profile and its relevance to the crime. In this way, the crime scene investigation will become 'experience-and-evidence-based', meaning that both the valuable experience of crime scene investigators and the rich scientific knowledge derived from historical case data and experiments can be taken into account when making decisions.