Author(s)

F. Gargiulo, G. Persechino, M. Lega, A. Errico

Abstract

In the Campania region in south-west Italy, there is growing evidence, including from a World Health Organization (WHO) study, that the accumulation of waste, illegal and legal, urban and industrial, has contaminated soil, water, and the air with a range of toxic pollutants including dioxins. An effective environmental monitoring system represents an important tool for the early detection of environmental violations. The IDES (Intelligent Data Extraction System) Project is a geo-environmental intelligence system (GIS), developed by the CIRA (Italian Aerospace Research Centre) with the contribution of universities and other government bodies, which aims to implement an advanced software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The main IDES modules are: imagery analysis module to monitor land-use and anthropogenic changes; environmental GIS module to fuse geographical and administrative information; epidemiological domain module; and semantic search module to discover information in public sources such as blogs, social network, forums and newspapers. This paper focuses on the semantic search module and aims to provide the greatest support to those extracting possible environmental crimes, through the collection and analysis of documents from online public sources. People rarely denounce criminal activity to the authorities. On the other hand, every day sees many people exposing the status of land degradation through blogs, forums and social networks. In addition, given the public interest, journalists often document critical environmental issues. All this unstructured information is often lost, due to the difficulty in collecting and analysing it. The IDES semantic search module is an innovative solution for aggregating the common uneasiness and thoughts of the people; it is able to transform and objectify public opinion in “human sensors” for safety environmental monitoring. In this paper we introduce methods and technologies used in some case studies and, finally, we report some representative results, highlighting innovative aspects of this applied research.

Keywords

illegal dumping, Landfill monitoring, interoperability, Text semantic search, Information retrieval, Geographical Information Systems