About the project

The TAJ project was formed to provide 150,000 police officers from two separate organizations (the Home Ministry – Gendarmerie Nationale - and Police Nationale) with the same modern IT tools to assist them in their investigations.

The TAJ project encompasses two separate police forces and replaces two separate existing application suites, containing multiple systems in each police organization, which were different from each other. The TAJ system was designed to allow the police officers of the two separate police forces to share a common system and criminal database, which enhanced joint investigations, reducing the amount of duplicated effort and increasing the chances of delivering positive outcomes.

The police organizations also required the solution to:

  • Protect personal data in accordance with personal protection laws
  • Make use of new technologies to assist in the identification of criminals
  • Provide statistical analysis tools.

The challenge

The main challenge we overcame in providing the solution was the involvement of the two disparate police forces that required us to:

  • Identify the parts of the specification that require a consensus between the two police organizations
  • Define the practical sessions precisely so that the correct customer staff could be made available to contribute.

The solution

In order to enable full analysis capabilities, delivery of the solution involved migrating disparate data items, implementing an exchange tool between two organizations and development of statistical analysis applications.

The TAJ solution also incorporates use of new technologies, including facial recognition for video images and photographs, collaborative working and image comparison tools. The capability is to be extended to include fingerprints and voice recognition. These tools deliver the following additional functionality:

  • Collaborative tools to share data and information among investigators
  • Image comparison to identify persons from physical characteristics such as tattoos and facial images
  • Exchange of data between multiple systems across the two police organizations, and between TAJ and other sources
  • Business intelligence tools for police statistics, etc.

For usability, a highly flexible search component based on FAST, a Microsoft product, was produced. Incorporating keyword and free text search, thesaurus capability, fuzzy matching, views on the search results that reflect the user status and the operational context, maintenance of back versions of indexes, clustering and prioritizing of results are also available.

Our involvement

CGI is responsible for the full, end-to-end TAJ solution, a combined project for the Home Ministry to deliver Gendarmerie and Police Officers with modern IT tools to assist them in their investigations. Areas of responsibility include:

  • Program and project management
  • Full data migration and replacement of legacy applications
  • Solution integration – based on multiple technologies in two different technical environments
  • Secure application development and maintenance
  • End-user services
  • Enterprise integration – with legacy systems and associated security regimes
  • Management of agreement
  • Secure infrastructure design
  • Intelligence solutions – application development to support the justice community
  • Business transformation – support for major business or cultural changes
  • Search and retrieve – searching across multiple disparate high volume data sources and types
  • Biometrics – facial recognition for video, images and photographs, in future fingerprint and voice recognition
  • Collaboration – tools to enhance and improve data sharing across connected working communities
  • Security management – implementation of a security model, support for penetration testing and accreditation
  • Full testing life cycle
  • Detailed training of users and developers
  • Installation and maintenance of TAJ solution

The technical environment includes FAST, Linux, JAVA/J2EE, Alfresco collaborative tools, Actuate BI tools, Cognitec facial recognition, NewPhenix image recognition and TIBCO EAI.

Key benefits

  • Increased performance of the French Police
  • More coherent data by joining up databases—data can be easily searched and analyzed by powerful tools, allowing staff to concentrate on operational duties
  • Use of innovative technology such as automated face recognition to search and compare face images
  • Tools assist collaborative work of the two French police organizations.

TAJ supports 150,000 users searching or analyzing over 35 terabytes of data drawn from two organizations, 40 million migrated files and 7 million digital images.

A success story

Through the TAJ project, CGI successfully provided Gendarmerie Nationale with benefits in:

Efficiency

  • Enhanced identification of suspects and stolen goods
  • Image comparison – to identify persons from physical characteristics such as tattoos and facial images
  • Business intelligence tools for police statistics, etc.

Collaboration

  • Single intelligence view across two organizations
  • Collaborative working
  • Collaborative tools to share data and information among investigators
  • Exchange of data between the two police organizations and between TAJ and other sources.

Productivity

  • Greater productivity
  • More efficient tools and interfaces – allowing staff to concentrate on operational duties
  • Search, analysis and correlation of data

 

Learn more about CGI capabilities for state, provincial and local government.

(Published 2013)