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Archeocontrol is a solution developed by Whitehall Reply for the Comando Carabinieri Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale (Carabinieri Section for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage, CCTPC) as an improvement on the previous "Leonardo" system, incorporating enhanced features to support management activities, tracking, archiving and historical access to all acts of theft against Italian cultural heritage. The system contains a wealth of knowledge that has been acquired over the course of the CCTPC’s investigative activities, with a structured description of the events that occurred; the artistic assets involved; the type of action taken to combat the crime; the individuals involved; and the resources employed.
The system has now been enhanced with a visual search feature accessible from a mobile application. This tool is used by the CCTPC for investigative activities and, at the same time, is available for use by members of the public with the aim of building their awareness and their participation in the Carabinieri Corp’s operational activities.
The CCTPC needed to redesign its operational tool for investigative analysis and tackling crimes related to the theft of works of art by integrating it with new features. In particular, it needed new tools for Business Intelligence and interoperability with external databases; more efficient management of the multimedia content in the database; and improved features to geolocate events with a particular focus on archaeological sites of interest.
There was also the need to develop a mobile application as both an operational tool for the Carabinieri Corp and as a way to involve members of the public and build their awareness of the protection of cultural heritage.
Whitehall Reply responded to these needs by equipping the CCTPC with the Archeocontrol system, which has redesigned the Leonardo system, optimising and improving the system’s features. It has introduced:
With Whitehall Reply’s expertise and sound knowledge gained over the years, the new system optimises preventive analysis tasks and helps to build up a more complete knowledge by integrating information from other administrations through the appropriate interoperability mechanisms. Archeocontrol also allows data from various types of multimedia systems to be processed (e.g. photo shoots, film clips and maps) and integrates cartographic information with alphanumeric data. The use of BI Oracle tools has in fact increased the effectiveness of decision-making and analysis.
To make the service fully accessible, for the first time the mobile application “iTPC Carabinieri” was created for mobile devices (smartphones or latest generation tablets) by a special department of the Carabinieri Corp, allowing members of the public to interface with the CCTPC and actively collaborate in the search for stolen works of art.
The application offers members of the public the opportunity to view the stolen works of art, i.e. all publications made by the CCTPC and edited by the Commander General of the Carabinieri Corp containing the most important stolen works of art over time. This is an excellent tool that shows how information today can tackle illegal trafficking in works of art.
Moreover, thanks to the visual research and image archiving features provided by the application, you can compare and recognise valuable stolen works of art in real-time by viewing the images and reporting the offence to the nearest CCTPC branch, thanks to the geolocation tool.
Whitehall Reply was selected by a special department of the Carabinieri Corp as a technological partner to create the first mobile application to support a special department and provide a service for the general public.
The solution was created using BI and Visual Search skills, using Oracle suites such as Oracle Spatial, Oracle Text and Oracle OBIEE. The Archeocontrol project’s new software platform has a multilingual interface, making all of the advanced system features accessible. Using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) ensures a high level of integration and interoperability with external systems. The system is fully accessible via the web using a common Internet browser. With regard to the mobile application, given the need to use some of the devices’ in-built features, such as the camera, two proprietary applications have been developed for iOS and Android devices, which were the most widespread systems at the time of completion.