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Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Temporal Reasoning for Criminal Forensics

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Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism

Abstract

The paper presents an application of temporal knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to forensic analysis, especially in answering certain investigative questions relating to time-sensitive information about a criminal or terrorist activity. A brief introduction to a temporal formalism called Point-Interval Logic is presented. A set of qualitative and quantitative temporal facts is taken from the London bombing incident that took place on July 7, 2005, to illustrate the use of temporal reasoning for criminal forensics. The information used in the illustration is gathered through the online news sites. A hypothetical investigation on the information is carried out to identify certain time intervals of potential interest to counterterrorist investigators. A software tool called Temper that implements Point-Interval Logic is used to run the analysis and reasoning presented in the paper.

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Correspondence to Abbas K. Zaidi .

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Zaidi, A.K., Ishaque, M., Levis, A.H. (2009). Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Temporal Reasoning for Criminal Forensics. In: Memon, N., David Farley, J., Hicks, D.L., Rosenorn, T. (eds) Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-09442-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-09442-6_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-211-09441-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-211-09442-6

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