Using Temporal Reasoning for Criminal Forensics Against Terrorists ? Abbas

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 terrorist activity. A brief introduction to a temporal formalism called Point-Interval Logic is presented. A set of 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 counter-terrorisism investigators. A software tool called Temper that implements Point-Interval Logic is used to run the analyses and reasoning presented in the paper.