Table 1 Procedural steps required to establish a federated database

1

Separate investigation groups agree to a federated database approach to share information and become a federation member.

2

All federation members agree to include in their constituent databases a common core of attribute fields with agreed-upon names.

3

Each federation member creates a secure, local database that conforms to the Structured Query Language (SQL) for all evidence items that they directly collect using compatible software that constructs and processes this database i.e. the database engine.

4

Each federation member acquires a criminal intelligence software system. Commercial systems include Analyst's Notebook [37]. One free system is id [60]. Pajek, a free social network analysis program, can compute some measures typically used in the analysis of criminal networks [52].

5

Each federation member modifies its criminal intelligence software system so that it can read input from a report file generated by the local database engine.

6

Each federation member adopts a policy in which any new evidence collected is entered only once and only into the local database.