Edinburgh Napier University

  The exchange of information between the police and community partner organisations forms a core aspect of effective policing and community service provision. However, this must be governed by sets of legislative and organisational rules, or policies. Therefore, a single request for information may require a quick assessment of a large number of rules to evaluate whether the request should be permitted or denied. Increasingly, community partner practitioners have seen a growing need for sharing information, resulting in a greater number of requests, which they need to evaluate in a short period of time. This situation has led to a growing number of incidents where policies have been applied inconsistently or inaccurately. This research describes a collaborative project, funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, between computer scientists, lawyers, police officers, medical professionals and social workers which aims to produce an effective, yet light-weight, information sharing platform designed from a policing perspective which provides explicit policy definition, a mechanism for quick and verifiable rules evaluation and a platform for evaluating how new rules affect existing policies. The goal is to develop a communication infrastructure that allows information sharing based on legal requirements ‘by design’, through a formal representation of legal rules in a firewall type system. Current work continues to model information sharing rules and there is a contact with Scottish Enterprise relating to the possible funding of a Proof-of-Concept grant.